Abney & Teal

I was approached by Ragdoll Productions and asked to help out on a  new project.  They were about to make a dramatic change to their pipeline and begin animating in 3D, using Maya.

What they needed was a series of rigs creating for their new show The Adventures of Abney and Teal, but these rigs weren`t your average type. They wanted to keep the stop motion approach, but attach these frames to a rig in Maya to make them easier to animate. So as the body rotated nothing actually moved in Maya, only the images changed.

As this was a new approach it took lots of outside the box thinking and in collaboration with the team at Ragdoll, we managed to come up with a rig which was intuitive, quick to animate with, could handle thousands of frames and retain the stop motion look when rendered.

On top of this I also created a host of tools to help them in Maya including an animation control window.