Element Animation Rigs

Client: Element Animation
Role: Rigging

Element Animation switched from animation software Cinema4D to Autodesk Maya. With that switch, I was hired to help out on various things. One of which being rigs. I created a modular rig that could be used to create all of the various characters in the Element Animation videos.

The majority of the animations produced by Element Animation are based on the video game Minecraft. In Minecraft everything is made out of cubes, including the people. While Element Animation has had different styles of rigs throughout the years, their current style is to have the characters remain cubes, just like in the game. The arms, legs, and torso don’t bend, and the face is two-dimensional.

The goal was to have a rig that could be transformed to any of the characters, that is very lightweight and thus fast, but that still has all of the features that they need. For this I went with a modular approach, where each body part is fully independent of the others, with only a single connection linking them together. Since the meshes don’t need to be deformed, rather just transformed, the meshes are located in groups which get moved around instead of deformers being applied to the meshes. This makes it trivial to swap out meshes to other meshes. In the end, the rig is very fast to evaluate. Animators can easily have tens of individual rigs in the scene, while still having interactive framerates.

For the ease of animators, all controllers, next to the curve handles, also have a hidden mesh that can be clicked in order to select the controller, making it faster to select controllers and allows the animator to go into “tweak mode” where they don’t even need to select the controller, they can just drag the limbs around in order to pose the characters.

The face is handled through animated texture coordinates, allowing the entire rig to only use a single material. Creating different characters is often as simple as swapping out the texture file.

The rig does have a few nice-to-have features. One of which is a dynamic feet offset, so that when the foot gets moved around, the leg will automatically move up or down to make sure that it doesn’t clip into the ground.

Many characters in Element Animation videos are villagers, who have big noses. In their animations, Element Animation has the noses sway based on the villager’s movement. To speed things up, I created a tool that automatically simulates the nose and bakes it into keyframes so that it can be further modified by the animator.