Creating a 3D Model of Treasure Planet's John Silver

Introduction

I'm Trystan Bleuven, a Rigging Artist based in France. I graduated in 2024 from Esra Rennes. I've always been a huge animation fan, doing stop motion and very basic 2D animation when I was younger, but I really got into 3D animation when I discovered and started to use Blender, right around the first Covid lockdown. I worked as an industrial welder back then, and when I had to go back to the workshop, all I could think about was 3D.

So I continued working both as a welder and on Blender, and I got accepted into a school a year later, after crafting a portfolio and putting money aside to cushion the school's price. 

After my first year, I started focusing more on rigging in Maya, which was the area I was passionate about and enjoyed the most. I was then assigned the rigger for my school's projects. After graduation, I got a rigging internship at Light VFX, a studio based in Angoulême, France, which worked on a lot of big features and series. During my internship, I contributed to two projects that are under NDA, but I showcase one on my private demo reel. I sculpted and helped to integrate the facial blendshapes of 4 characters for a famous video game trailer.

This is also where I met my former supervisor and mentor, Cyril Gibaud, head of rigging at Light and owner/founder of ToonKit, a rigging-specialized studio also based in Angoulême. We really enjoyed working together, and so after my internship, we stayed in contact and he lent me his proprietary rigging tools for Maya, on which he had trained me during my time at Light, to help me achieve a more professional demo reel and eventually get my first gig as a Rigging Artist.

Treasure Planet Project

I started the Treasure Planet project, John Silver, because I wanted to have a challenging piece in my portfolio, one that would reflect my latest skills in rigging and stand out. Since the industry is quite challenging for juniors right now, and I couldn't receive any positive responses to my job applications, I decided to take the time to do the best work I could and submit it to studios.

This is a villain I've always loved and a movie I grew up with. He's a very interesting character in all aspects, but especially for rigging, since he's a cartoon character with a wide range of motion and expressions, but he is quite big, has lot of fat around the belly and neck, he has all of his cyborg parts, eye, ear, arm, leg and has also a good layer of clothes.

I couldn't find a detailed enough 3D model of him, so I decided to do it myself, because I wanted to be able to rig his cyborg part like in the movie. This was, in itself, pretty challenging since I'm not by any means a Character Artist. I gathered a bunch of references of him, 90% being screenshots of the movie, since there were not many official character sheets and such. I also used these references for the blendshapes sculpting, so he can be animated as close to the original character.

Here is a walkcycle animated by Levi Ames. 

The Character's Movement

For rigging, my main tool was Oscar, a rigging toolkit for Maya developed by Cyril for his company. I can't show what it looks like, but you can think of it as a very advanced node editor, dedicated to rigging in Maya. What's great with this tool is that it reduces redundant actions you can find in rigging, and lets you focus on the construction and logic of the systems you want to create, and it also allows for building and rebuilding on top of your own system you made with Maya "vanilla".

Here is an example of redundancy: I had to rig multiple pistons per finger, so with Oscar, I created a piston system, which is a typical aim/point constraint setup, made guides for it, saved it as a template, and then I could duplicate it as much as I wanted very quickly.

This is my first project using tools that you'd typically find in a studio, and I'm very grateful for it, even though learning them took time. In the end, you end up saving a bunch of it, and you minimize errors.

For weight painting, my main tool has become the WeightEditor from Tyler Fox, TD at Blur Studio, which you can find on GitHub. It's a sort of component editor but on steroids, you can be very precise with it, and it has cool features, like assigning weights on soft selection or reallocating weights locally, etc. I skin almost exclusively with it now, but if I need some visualization on the mesh, I'd use Maya's Weight painting tool, out of habit and because I find it reliable, although not the most efficient. I also recently started to use NgSkinTools, but only for its Smooth tool.

Breakdowns of the Arm and Leg

The leg is a stretchy IK/FK setup. The challenge was to incorporate the accordion-like calf, which must squash or extend under the character's weight when he is walking, but without deforming the hard top and bottom parts of it. For this, I used a lattice, skinned to two joints, and connected to the knee, with some scaling to compensate for the leg stretching.

You'd animate it using the middle or knee control, squeezing the calf and stretching the thigh, which can be compensated by the hips, since he is supposed to have a bit of limping. There are quite a few joints along the leg to give more flexibility, and the scapula itself has its dedicated IK solver.

There is no Foot Roll on this setup, the foot pad is aim-constrained to the ground control, and a control that extends below the foot and is aligned to the calf, so you can switch between the two with an attribute, keeping the footpad lined up with the ground when it is in contact. You can also animate it without attributes.

At first, I wanted to build a system based on distance, but figured, since the actual contact happens within very few frames, that it was easy to animate using a simpler system like this.

The arm is a bit more complex, since I wanted to be able to switch tools like in the movie, and it has a lot of moving parts. Right now, it has 3 tools: the hand, a sword, and a triple claw. You can choose which tools are present on the arm with attributes, and then switch them using the rotating arrow control. It will scale the tools automatically based on distance when going inside the arm, so it can fit in the sort of tubes that you can open up and rotate, and you still have control over the scaling.

The challenge here was that the pivot for the switch happens before the actual wrist or IK effector. To solve this, each tool is both skinned to its respective joints and parented to the arm, but also deformed by a relative cluster. By setting the cluster to relative and reordering the inputs, putting the skinCluster first, I have no double transformations when switching the tools.

The Animation

The chain animates automatically, it's set up with a spline IK and a chain of joints, each link having his joint for accurate deformation. By connecting the switch control to the IK's offset, I get a realistic chain movement, and for the gears to follow, I used some basic gear maths: rotation = Distance/Radius.

The entire setup is scalable and follows the eventual stretching of the forearm.

Another challenge was to be able to stretch his arm where it was mechanically correct, in this case, his bicep. In FK, pretty straightforward, you'd translate his arm control.

But in IK, I have to once again compensate for the stretching. I wanted my forearm to remain the same size after stretching, but not having the wrist detach from it, and having clean deformations along the entire forearm, taking into account that the tubes have their own skinning to be able to open them up.

Again, I opted for the trusted lattice, so I can stack the deformations. So effectively, the stretching can still occur, but I can reposition the elbow control to get it only on the bicep.

As for every tube and cable present on the rig, I've used wire deformers, very light and easy to set up, smooth deformations, and easy rebuild of the curve if you need more CVs.

You need to skin the base wire and mesh to a joint inside your hierarchy to get scaling and rotation to work properly, and you can skin the deforming curve to additional controllers. That's also how I rigged the bicep spring, using wire and lattice for a smooth deformation without any geo squashing.

Conclusion

The rig is still a work in progress, so the next steps are to polish the facial and to rig the clothes, then I plan to send it to animators so they can give me feedback for the final touches, and hopefully animate some shots with it so I can build a cool demo. The main goal is to get a role in a studio! If anyone is interested in the rig, they can hit me up on LinkedIn.

I faced many challenges, but I think ultimately doing the full pipeline on a character was the real difficulty. I did the sculpting/modeling, retopology, texturing (not quite happy with it yet), and grooming before going to the rig, and all these tasks required different skills in which I was more or less proficient. I had time on my side and wanted to have a cool project, so I went for it, but in the future and for my next projects, I would rather try to collaborate with actual character artists who are also building their portfolio.

The most important lesson I learned doing this project, and one that Cyril taught as well with his years of experience in production, is that it's often a good idea to try and do things the simplest way possible. I think, and I'm sure I'm not alone on this, I had a tendency to want to overcomplicate things, but in the end, you lose efficiency, your setups get confusing, and the simpler solution often turns out to be the more elegant one.

Although I don't consider myself a beginner anymore, I'm also not a seasoned professional, so I wouldn't dare to give too much advice. But if there's one thing I've learned and tried to do more myself, it's to regularly ask for feedback and showcase your work, even if it's not perfect.

I've found Reddit to be a great place for that because many artists there have valuable experience and insightful advice to share. It also helps with visibility, in fact, that's how 80 Level discovered one of my posts and offered me this interview opportunity.

I'd like to emphasize that I'm currently available for any work opportunities or inquiries about the rig or possible collaborations.

Trystan Bleuven, Rigging Artist

Interview conducted by Gloria Levine