Bo Meredith
3D Character Rigging
Demo Reel
Character Rigging
Fall 2024 - Spring 2025
This is a 3D animated short film produced through SCAD Animation Studios over the span of 9 months. The base team consisted of 20 animation majors with varying skillsets, and later grew to include over 40 students between Savannah and Atlanta.
Programs:
Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Blender
I was responsible for building the rig of one of the two protagonists, Spike, and finishing the rig of the "Inklings."
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​The creation of Spike's rig was a very important learning experience for me. I was able to overcome many challenges and really test my capabilities as a rigging artist, especially in my first production environment.
I was assigned the rig a couple weeks before our semester. Due to the timeline of when I joined, I was given around 4 days to complete the main bulk of the rig. This is something I was able to accomplish, and the animation team had time to test the rig out.
Around 2 weeks into the quarter, Spike's model would be updated to better suite the vision for the film. I used this as an opportunity to work closely with the modeler to capture the look of the concept, all while maintaining his general silhouette to prevent complications with moving around the rig.
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I was able to reposition everything without having to restart.
I created a translation offset group for each control, and cleaned up any history on joints through removing constraints and then re-constraining. Any IKs had to be recreated, but because my node graphs were saved, I just had to plug the new IK handles into them without having to reset up everything. This process took me around 3-4 days to complete.
We also had a few ideas with how we wanted the arms to be articulated.
We were between Spike's arms moving in a more naturalistic way, or in a more cartoony.
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We ended up liking the look of the latter, since it stayed truer to the concept of the characters being doodles having come to life. It also worked as a good contrast to Studs, the other main character of the film.
Spike spends most of the film flailing his arms around, so I created his new arms to act more like ropes. Instead of an elbow naturally forming, it was pulled out with a control.​ The arms using a ribbon set up also allowed for additional deformers to implemented, which served to help convey his cartoony nature.
I also experimented with having different parts of the rig move to compensate for transformations on specific controls. For the headband I used offset groups that were influenced by the head control, and for the arms I used geometry constraints to keep the arms binded to the body, since they were modeled as separate geo.
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Lastly, I experimented with implementing lattice deformers into the rig through the eyes. The base model of the eyes are not perfect spheres, so if the eyes were to rotate in the socket, the warped geo would begin to show. I solved this by using the lattice deformer to shape the eyes from perfect spheres into my desired shape. I then made sure to keep the rotation functionality input below the lattice input, so whichever way the eyes looked, the lattice kept the shape without being affected by outside transformations.
For the Inklings, the majority of the rig had already been completed, but I added some additional features that helped flesh out the characters a lot more.
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When I was given the rig, the only thing the eyes could do was look around, which wouldn't be viable for a character that can only emote through their eyes. I decided to use this as an opportunity to experiment more with the lattice deformer, since I has some prior knowledge with Spike's eyes.​
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My experience with these rigs has helped push me into learning to adapt quicker, and to experiment more.
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It's shown me what can and can't work, and how to find shortcuts when necessary, especially for such tight deadlines.
Spring 2025
This is a mixed media short film I directed that took the course of 10 weeks to complete during my team and I's spring semester in 2025. The team consisted of 20 animation majors with varying skillsets.
Programs:
Maya, Arnold, Substance Painter 3D, Nuke, Premiere Pro, Toon Boom
I was responsible for the design and creation of all 3D characters, most notably their rigs.
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​The Grim rig consisted of a complex curve-based bend system for the limbs, deformable, shrink-wrapped eye sockets to fit the cartoony style, and detachable hands to move freely around the sleeves.
This allowed for an extremely malleable and deformable rig capable of hitting key exaggerated poses.
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The rig took me 2 weeks to complete, plus an extra week for any bug fixes. Active communicate was had between me and the animators at all time, and any requests were addressed as soon as possible.
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The rig, being so well made for such a tight turnaround, prevented the animators from having to waste time fighting the rig, and allowed us to extend the runtime of our film to almost 4 minutes.
About Me
Hello, my name is Bo Meredith; I am a 3D rigging and tech artist from Austin, Texas, and a current student at Savannah College of Art and Design.
I knew growing up what I wanted to do, and I worked every day to get to where I am now. I have a deep appreciation for art, both computer-generated and traditional, and I personally regard the more technical aspects of creation as its own form of art.
Along with character rigging, I also have a strong understanding of hard/organic surface modeling, look development, and lighting.
Skills
Maya, Houdini, ZBrush, Redshift, 3D Substance Painter, Adobe Creative Suite, Arnold Renderer, Python, Nuke