The Golem Dual Rig

Planning phase

There were a lot of things that needed structure to be able to know where the parts should go when transformed to another character. First thing was to color code each piece to easily see where they should go and which parts are unique. 

When the mesh parts had locations to go to the next part was to tell where the export joints should be parented to. I created a naming standard that would tell me or any other how to name the joints.

The assembly

Skeletons were set up to have a color coded guide skeleton for each golem. These guide skeletons had controls that made it possible to animate controls that are in an hierarchy. The export skeleton has no hierarchy and can move individually between guide skeletons. Each export joint has a tweak controller controlling them with a blending option from 0 – 100 for more flexibility when animating the values.

The offset group for the export joint is handling all incoming parent / scale constraints. 

When prototyping the switch one problem was very clear, instantly when the parent constraint value didn’t add up to 1 it snapped to the one having the highest constraint value. This is solved by giving remaining values to a world locator which is solved with a plusminus average and a clamp node. (example on the prototype)