BB-8 Rig

I was shown a free downloadable model of a BB-8 from the 7th Star Wars film. There is a script here that gets it to roll properly, but it has no animation controls.
So one evening I took to rigging it! ...aaaand the next few days making that rig better.


I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. This is a quick animation I did with it, after Harry used it for a bit I think I might change how the head works to make it a bit more simple to animate but it's just a minor change.

Just like how Karen Halliwell taught us, and the same as I rigged the Behemoth for Drone, I used offset groups to align the curves. I made sure the outliner was neat and made sense, and that did really help when I had to troubleshoot some issues, in my first result the head was stuck to the ball, so span round and round and round, funny, but not really what I was going for.



In the end I got it working with no constraints, just connections in the node editor, as this is supposed to be most efficient. I didn't need to actually use any bones since the mesh doesn't need to deform at all, although I may add bones to be able to bend the antenna on the head later on.

I feel I have a much better understanding of how groups can be used to create different movement, for example with this the head is able to rotate and move separately on its own axis (via the head wiggle group) but still rotate around the center of the larger ball for normal movement.

I also added a simple script to remove any rotate values on the ball, just in case you want to revert what the rolling script does and change some animation.

Overall I'm pretty pleased with this, I'll have to wait and see to get some real feedback on how it animates, but definitely a fun and useful little bit of work.

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