I have teamed up with a previous team that i worked with back in 2nd year animation. the director Jaime Buchanan has wanted to create a short animated sketch adapted from his comic design 'Stupid Kow' the sketch involves a farmer a cow and a box milk. if you want to find out more visit the group blog were you can find out what's going on and what the story is about. My job is to create body rigs fro both the kow and the farmer characters. the kow i have been informed doesn't have to move his legs as well just arms and head and general movement and the farmer has to be fully functional.
using my research from the Dee rig i was able to create a rig fairly quickly. but i soon came into problems with the model of the kow. the mesh on the model did not have the required edge loops.
as you can see the arm has a shoulder joint, a elbow and wrist joint. the green lines on the arm are what are called edge loops, as you can see there are 3 lines that surround the elbow this is bad as there should be 5 or so to make life easier when paint weighting the character. the more edge loops the more influence you can give from the elbow joints.
Instead of sending the model back to the modeller i have added them in myself and this is the rig so far.
Here are some reference videos that i have been using to help me in my animation ideas
