Evan Boucher | www.evanboucher.com

Body Rigging Lead on the Show: This required overseeing and quality controlling the body rigs of a team of eight other artists. Also developed workflows and techniques to help the team be more efficient while delivering rigs to animation.

Responsible for Wolfspider body rig. Face Rig by Cheng-Chia Kiera Yang. Required giving animators ability to seamlessly transition from wolf-like to spider-like motion. This meant rigging the legs with maximum flexibility and the ability to move their attachment point to anywhere on the body. For a more detailed breakdown of this system, please see here.

Responsible for Phil body rig. Face rig by Cheng-Chia Kiera Yang. Required special attention to body deformations since he spends a few sequences in the film with only his shorts on. Added custom hand controls so animators cold dial in finger tendon shapes.

Responsible for Dawn body rig. Face rig by Cheng-Chia Kiera Yang. Required a unique 'bee sting hand' variant.

Responsible for 'Octocrab' body rig. Face rig by Cheng-Chia Kiera Yang. Required building a customizable tentacle module based on Nathaniel Dirksen's tentacle from "Penguins of Madagascar" but with some new features and optimizations for our more modern workflows. I Animated this test of the rig as a proof of concept, but the creature was written out of the film.

Muscle sim rigs - One of the development tasks for the show was to build a simple muscle simulation workflow to get some stylized secondary motion almost for free. This system ended up being installed into ALL the human characters, as well as Chunky the tiger, the wolfspiders, all the monkey tribe characters, pigators, and more. The motion on this tiger test show the out of the box results, but simulation values could be tuned per muscle per shot. (Tiger body rig by Jaryd Snover.)

Responsible for Deathgripper Face Rig. Required custom tusk retraction system, implemented by sliding a poseable joint chain along a UV surface combined with some custom shape work to sell the idea. For more information, please check out the more detailed breakdown of this system here.

Responsible for Crimson Goregutter dragon face rig. When animating the character later on the production, I added a number of cluster controls to the body rig to approximate various 'muscle groups' in order to animate jiggle and help sell the size and weight of the animal. Body rig by Hongseo Park.

'Simple Dragon' Workflow - Responsible for setting up and implementing a custom dragon rigging workflow to allow the production to add a number of new creatures to the film at a fraction of the cost of the hero dragons. Dragons I rigged using these systems include the Fireworm swarms, the kite-like Timberjacks, baby Nadder and Nightmare. I also animated some 'simple dragon' flap cycles, (seen on the Fireworm in these clips) since the animation development resources were limited at the time.

Responsible for some detailed sculpting work and unique custom controls on Grimmel's face. The bulk of the face rig was set up by Dick Walsh, but I was responsible for sculpting the crow's feet, nose wrinkles, chin and cheek wrinkles, as well as custom controls on the lips to help create more graphic shapes.

Responsible for dragon armor rigs for Astrid and Ruffnut. Required automation and custom animation controls on shoulder pads, boots, and helmets. Designs of all the dragon armor suits were completely unique, so had to come up with new solutions to solve similar problems, since the setup couldn't be directly translated from one to another.

Responsible for "Dave the Octopus" face rig and neck integration. Tentacle and body rig by Nathaniel Dirksen. Extreme range of the face required many custom non-standard setups from the typical DreamWorks rigging workflow, including the ability for the jaw to follow the shape of the neck when opening. I was also responsible for mermaid penguin face rigs, octopus henchmen face rigs, along with other misc. face and prop rigs throughout the film.

Responsible for face rigs on the two gorilla character. Bodies by Alan Weider. Required quick turnaround and also extensive range for broad stylized look.

Responsible for Jimbo and Baby Francis Body Rigs, including setting up custom controls and shapes for jiggle and fat rolls. Also responsible for Baby Francis face rig and the diaper rig setup on both characters. Produced with proprietary rigging software at DreamWorks Animation.