Advanced Ribbon Rig Demo

Check out the tutorial here:    • [deprecated] Rigging Dynamic Controls...  

I put together a prototype of a generalized spline rig with a slew of settings and controls for modifying its behavior. The result is a one-size-fits-all rigging add-on that addresses several common needs at once and takes nearly no time to implement. It enables different forms of aesthetically pleasing arcs, as well as giving picky animators full and dynamic control over the shape of the model and behavior of the rig.

The frog rig had only a skin cluster as a deformer and used classic linear skinning. Everything in this rig is native Maya nodes and expressions, no plugins.

After following a tutorial by Jorn-Harald Paulsen, I kept going until I couldn't think of more controls that you would want. If you are into rigging you should give it a look.
http://www.riganimator.com/procedural...

I learned a lot about creating these advanced setups using different procedural texture nodes, and I thought it gave remarkably nice looking deformations. The sliding controls are an easy way to animate an otherwise difficult motion to fabricate.

I'd love to hear what you guys think about it. I think this could easily be part of a really useful toolset for rigging and animation artists, and I could probably develop this further. The controls are set up to be additive, so I could even create a gui to easily add or remove controls as they're needed. That being said I'm still pretty new to all this stuff. I've already come up with several ways to improve it, so the next version is already in the works.

I'm still working on a sort of "Appendix A" to Jorn-Harald Paulsen's tutorial, which shows you how I set up the adjustable bend controls with ramp attributes. And if anyone's interested, I'll make a video that goes into detail on the controls in this rig.

Character models by me
Song is Fire of Ada by Tin Hat Trio