During pre-production, in preparation for rigging the centaur character, I undertook various rigging tests so that I knew the inner workings of the rig before production began. Each test tried something new with developing my knowledge and the skills I needed to create the centaur rig.

Here I developed my understanding of the IK systems by building a set of IK arms with rotation and elbow controls. Overall they worked fairly well and the skinning was quite effective and managed to get nice deformations around the wrists and elbow. The next step to progress from this is to build in FK controls as well as IK to allow animators the flexibility and freedom to choose what method they see fit.



These tests worked around building the horse part of the centaur's legs focusing on the front and rear. Overall they work effectively but further work around the knee joints will be required to create nicer deformations. As it stands they create an unnatural pose that, when animated, may require a lot of tweaking and fiddling to work.


The last tests focused on the muscle systems on the arms and legs. I decided to create human limbs rather than the ones necessarily used in the centaur for simplicity and greater understanding of how muscle systems work within the human body.