Back in June, while helping Dave Spamer with the Tron remake, he asked for some help creating a medical animation. Now that all the secret parts have been removed from the animation, here’s the part that I worked on. My contribution was rigging and shaders for the vessel animation.
Medical Animation
Ulysses Unzueta is a student at Animation Mentor, and was a student of mine. He needed the bag rigged for his scene, so I helped him out. After studying his blocked shot I decided it was best to treat the bag as though it were a spine rig. Only thing missing is FK joint chain for the spine. I’ll add it later. Here is Uly’s work in the refining stage.
Bag Rig
In this shot, the bag and the rig for the bag is my contribution. The character, Stewie, is a product of the Animation Mentor online school.
You all can have the bag, too. Cheers. 
Download it.
Here’s a demo on the rig.
Bag Rig Demo
I think this is pretty cool stuff, and I’m proud of my work on this project. In October of 2008, I was invited to collaborate with Steve Mehallo, Jim Cassio, and Michael Scott to animate a prototype of a new website standard. I was responsible for creating and programming the animation. I was also responsible for following Steve Mehallo’s design of the interface to the pixel.
I hadn’t used Flash since AS 1.0 days, so I had to learn Action Script 3.0 programming very fast. I used research material published by Keith Peters to achieve my goal in one month (all while teaching full-time). Big thanks to Keith for being a great author and teacher! I used to dread programming in Flash, but now it’s one of my favorite things in Flash and is thoroughly satisfying. Animating with code is very cool. I retired from this project in December of 2008 to take on a part-time position teaching at the Art Institute of Sacramento from January 2009 – June 2009.
You can shift + click the circles to have them drag about. Also, alt + click to enable gravity, then you can shift + click to throw them around. See a larger version for the website prototype.
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