Amanda Rabade

I had 7 weeks to prepare a 15 minute presentation to pitch my thesis project to my department faculty. The problem is I still couldn’t decide on a topic to research. I looked into some Maya rigging tools that could be improved on, and came across Maya Muscle. It’s a novel concept, but Autodesk hasn’t updated the tool in years, so there wasn’t too much documentation on it. A lot of the in-house rigging tools already have pretty decent third party alternatives (ngSkin tools for painting weights for example). My motivation for picking my thesis topic was to do something I had never done before. In the past I had turned down opportunities to be a rigger on projects because what they wanted was “too hard” for me. I wanted my thesis to be my chance to do something ambitious (in moderation of course).

I decided I was going to research stylized facial rigs. During my research I came across the “Translate UVN Deformer.” This was a technique developed by Blue Sky Studios for “The Peanuts Movie.” I found Ignacio Barrios’s rigging reel from the film, and was in complete awe. I can’t even count the amount of times I’ve seen this reel, it is the coolest rigging reel I’ve ever found.

As I continued to research this deformer, I found my way to Jonah Reinhart’s website. Jonah Reinhart is a SCAD Alum and has a number of blog posts focused on tool building and rigging. I immediately emailed him and asked if he was willing to meet up to talk about this deformer he developed a tool for. He was so nice and incredibly helpful and we maintained communication through email throughout the quarter. By this point I had decided to recreate an originally 2D character in 3D.

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I started to look for references of other films or TV shows that have successfully translated 2D characters into a 3D world. My first reference is The Peanuts Movie as it involves the development of the particular rigging method I want to research, and is a successful example of recreating a 2D world in 3D. The next reference that came to mind was the Paramount+ spin off series for “SpongeBob SquarePants” titled “Kamp Koral SpongeBob’s Under Years.” Despite the fact that all the characters are supposed to be younger versions of themselves, they are still recognizable as themselves.

While researching “Kamp Koral,” I found some animation tests done by Pablo Smith, the Animation Director on the project.

He also uploaded a video on how he keeps the main character SpongeBob on model. This is super important for any kind of animation production, but especially important for a production that is reusing characters in a completely different medium.

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Going down the same mental path for “Kamp Koral,” I also looked into the 2021 reboot of the 1991 series “Rugrats.” This series also did an amazing job maintaining the “ugly cute” style from the original series.

Despite all 3 references being excellent examples of 3D reboots of originally 2D shows/films, I only wanted to focus on the rigging done in “The Peanuts Movie.”

I collected a multitude of sources consisting of SIGGRAPH papers and other articles discussing production on very stylized films. I compiled all of my research thus far into a presentation to then pitch to the department’s faculty.

After my project got approved, I recruited a modeler to get started on Billy’s model and hopefully have him rig ready by the time the next phase of my thesis began in January.