Truly a mind-bending rig by Mindbender Animation Studio! Love the 2D super cartoony look and feel of the setup and it’s modularity!! Character setup by Richard Kazo and his team at Kippcase Rigging Studio. Watch trailer below.
The Food Thief – Teaser Shot from Mindbender on Vimeo.
It is a very clever setup! The setup is mimicking a stop motion feel and style of cartoon design and deformation, just like how we can mold clay into any form. If we think of it simply (simplicity can be complicated :), the rig seems to be based on a lot of blendshapes (PSD), modular setup with clever deformation dependency graph (there are some benefits of modeling history in this kind of rig build where we can utilize construction history to rig advantage) and animation gimmicks setup and of-course the ShrinkWrap! The placement of the arm, leg, etc all seems to be different geometry with respective setup. The body transformation (specially the mouth) is a very cleverly art directed morph! You can see how there is a thin lining geometry for covering. Then there seems to be a final render mesh on top, with fur and all rendering goodness riding on top of the modular rig underneath! And then there are new tools like Shot Sculpt which allows you to refine shapes post animation!!