A new approach to procedural character rigs

For 'Horton hears a Who' the character technical directors at Blue Sky Studios developed a new approach to procedural character rigs. Many rigging systems reduce or eliminate redundant work by importing pre existing components into a character scene or using scripts to generate components or entire rigs; our system goes several steps further. Essentially an object oriented approach, it allows the artist to assemble the template for a character rig independently of the character itself. The template exists as a network of nodes that defines each component's attributes and functionality, identifies argument joints and surfaces, and represents the components' relationships to each other and to their arguments. These highly modular networks offer consistency, robustness, and flexibility.