Oil: An Odyssey for Mobil 1, Tooned rigs

The challenge

Alongside the McLaren 50th anniversary series, Framestore made a six-part Tooned mini-series for Mobil 1 about the story of oil. Jenson Button, Sergio Perez and Alexander Armstrong as the Professor all returned, and NASCAR's Tony "Smoke" Stewart joined the cast. The story travels through history, so the characters needed new costumes, and some episodes needed horses and chariots on a very short schedule.

Cartoon professor in a white coat and goggles examining a translucent blue engine on a pink background

What I did

Tony Stewart and Sergio Perez. I rigged both characters. The new characters all got full body rigs with bendy systems and fully rigged facial setups. Framestore's modellers gave me great models to work with, and the shapes they built in let the rigs deform really well.
Wardrobe changes. Each character had several outfits. I skinned and weighted each one to the base rig, so animators could swap costumes with a simple attribute change.
Horses and chariots. The brief was as much control as possible in one week. I rigged one horse fully, then duplicated it wherever it was needed. To keep scenes light, I split the setups into three assets: a single horse, a single horse and cart, and a double horse and cart.
Straps. The hardest part was letting the straps flex without cutting into the horse. I used projected weighting with follicle-driven joints layered over the horse's surface. I tested nCloth here but didn't use it.
Chains. The chain connections used a stretchy IK spline set up before animation, plus an nCloth setup driven by passive objects and constraints to the horse and cart. Four to six controllers let animators adjust the chain's weight and bounce on top of the dynamics.