Mobil1 Tooned
Oil: An Odyssey
As well as this year's 50th-anniversary celebration for McLaren with the Tooned Series. We made a six-part mini-series of Tooned for Mobil 1 called the Story of Oil. Jenson Button, Sergio Perez and Alexander Armstrong as the Professor all return, with NASCAR's Tony 'Smoke' Stewart also turning up for the ride. Enjoy!
As well as rigging Tony Stewart, I also rigged Sergio Perez. These models were amazing and the deformation that was created was a testament to Framestore's very talented modellers that allowed the great shapes that this rig could produce.
The characters each had multiple wardrobe changes and these were skinned and weighted to the base rig with simple attribute changes for the animators.
Horse Rig
The brief for these horses was to give them as much control as possible in the turn around as could be achieved. One horse was rigged and then the rig duplicated where needed to save time as only a week was given for these rigs.
The chariot rigs were added to different assets so that the animators could have fast scenes with only the needed sized rigs that were going to be shown. The setups that were provided were a single horse, single horse and cart or double horse and cart. The hardest parts of these rigs by far was making the straps have the needed flexibility without intersecting to the mesh in the horse. This was achieved with a mixture of projected weighting and follicle driven joints layered over the surfaces of the horse. Ncloth was tested, but not used here on the straps.
The chain connections were controlled by an IK stretchy spline was set-up pre-animation. They also used an nCloth setup that could be driven from the connected passive objects and constraints to the horse and cart. This setup had 4-6 controllers that let the animators control the chain weight and bounce above the dynamics.
It's always great to see your rigs being animated by such professionals and making them look this good!
TONY STEWART
Mobil1 Youtube
