Kiel Figgins  -  Character Animator
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Shoe Rig - KMart Pitch from Kiel Figgins on Vimeo.


KMart - Protege - Pitch
Winter 2008

Duties Include: Animation and Setup

For a shoe commercial. A really odd setup to work with. All hand keyed, no dynamics. Also, those are photographs at the beginning.


Due to a number of emails, here's how I created this animation:

1. Photo Swarm:
The photo swarm created the general motion with a swarm script I wrote. The objects are controlled by lattices and deformers to get the bend, then an entire lattice put over the end shoe shape to wrap it as a whole. Free floating photos that fall out and float down are meshes with bend deformers and lattices on them. They have a similiar rig as the photos used to form the shoe.

2. Flap Covers:
The shoe cover flaps where created with a joint based solution so that it looks like a rib cage of joints. Then animated to curl in like fingers closing around the shoe. Animation offset applied to get the stepped approach. The secondary (outer) covers are hand keyed lattices, where I animated the acutual points of the lattice in world space.

3. Zipper:
The zipper section was controlled with wire deformers for the teeth part. The acutual zipper was hand keyed in world space.

4. Straps:
All the straps are lattices driven by joints. These joints were animated straight ahead using their translate, rotate and scale to get the motion. The buckle strap had additional FK elements for the metal buckle and prong.

5. Final Notes:
-The final result was then applied with a lattice for osilation and jiggles while the different sections were forming and animating.
-No blend shapes where used
-Only polygons were used, with a smooth mesh applied afterwards for rendering
-All hand keyed and custom setups.

Pretty straight forward. Worked in a layered sequence, then went back in and tweeked the interaction to give more variety. Like the straps deforming the covers an blocking the zippers path. Overall, I had about a day and some change to figure out that section of the commercial. The first section was a swirling vortex of the photos and the last section had the shoe get covered with ice shards (not shown).

Property of Shilo, 2008