Animating and Rigging the Characters in Mega Dimension Ripper 9000

How we made our characters come to life with rigging, skin weights, and master controls for animating. 

Initially we worked on concepting ideas for characters that would match the colorfulness and differences similarly to the levels of Mega Dimension Ripper 9000. Unlike the levels and the props that were made to go with them, the characters needed to be brought to life with animations. 

First, we needed to give the characters a skeleton and rig them to move properly. Without the rig and skeleton, the process of animating the characters would take forever and not be nearly as accurate. A rig is like a control system to select and move different parts of the body for our characters. Like the anatomy of a person the characters needed a skeletal system and joints for each body part such as shoulders, wrists, knees, etc. Some joints needed to be in place for the others to connect to and if the hierarchy was wrong then there would be issues in the animations. For example, if a knee joint was before a hip joint, things would look weird or not work at all. We would need to connect all the joints together with a root joint, which would be parent to all the other joints. Any joint under the root joint would be considered its child. The hierarchy then becomes similar to a family tree, which starts with the root joint. Furthermore, a hip joint would be a child to the root joint, but be parent to a knee joint, which in turn would be parent to an ankle joint that would be a child to the knee joint, and so on. 

However, the characters would still need skin to look the part which is created by first selecting the character model(s) to be used as the actual skin itself. See the example above, the chest and chest joint are selected. Once the model or skin is bound to the joints we can then set up a control to make it easier to animate certain body parts. The controls are seen in the example as thin blue looking circles and eclipses. Without the control system the character would be very difficult to animate and give it life. Lastly, this long process of putting everything together allowed each of our characters to run, jump, dash, and have other animations to give them life. Without these animations our characters would be lifeless statues with no personality that makes them unique and fun. 

-Joshua GearHeitman