Rigging

Serpent Rig

face controls

The entire rig has an IK and FK switch, as well as a separate switch for just the facial controls.

Rig driven motion

The most prominent feature of this rig is its fluid rig driven motion. Most bones have damped track controls that follow the bone in front of them; which I fine-tuned with rotation constraints and altering the influence of individual tracks.

I also added controls to affect the influence of automatic motion, which can be keyframed to be off or lessened for specific areas of the rig.

Body Controls

The rig also has full FK and IK controls to animate manually.

chicken rig

My first time rigging. Chicken modeled in Maya and weight painted and rigged in Blender. Rig has some basic IK controls.

If I do another bird, I'll make the base model have folded wings...

animations

I kept the idle animation (far left) subtle, and exaggerated the others that are only seen far in the background of the scene.

Manta Ray Rig

MANTA RAY RIG

This rig is very similar to the serpent rig, having its own rig driven motion as well as controls.

This one is a little less fancy and done much quicker as its for a lower poly background creature.