Unicorns: Break The Cage
I created this animated video with Talewise, a children’s educational company, to be shared with schools and libraries across the USA. The character puppets were all created in Photoshop, and rigged and animated in Adobe Character Animator.
Official trailer, edited by Ken Nicholas.
The cast of characters I designed for the film. All poses shown here were made in Character Animator using the rigged puppets.
Sonora's rig is pretty standard across all of the bipedal characters. They each have four rigs, all capable of doing different things. One is designed for walking, while others use Limb IK features to allow the characters to bend over. This is her "close up" rig, which has a swap set that allows her to change which direction she is facing. Each direction includes a head turner, and their own Limb IK setup. Each rig has swap sets and triggers for different hand positions, eyebrow and eyelid expressions, and mouth shapes. In addition, they all have draggable arms, and some also have draggable legs. In Sonora's rig, her ponytail can dangle, and blow in the wind.
Sonora - An outspoken and courageous animal lover, she's wise beyond her years. She doesn't take no for an answer, so its best to not get in her way.
Every expression has several frames transitioning from one pose to the next, like Gene’s neutral expression to sad expression, as seen here. Every character also has two mouth sets. One is happy, and the other is sad/angry. These expressions can be swapped between and carried from one head position to the next while animating.
An excerpt from the film, showing off the walk behavior on one of the characters as he runs out of frame, yelling for his mom.
The horse/unicorn was the most complex body to rig. It uses a Limb IK and three walk behaviors. The head can be turned to face forward and back, but the horse is always viewed in this profile / three-quarter view.
Horse expressions
It took some playing around to make a functioning quadrupedal walk cycle within Character Animator. The hose is basically split down the middle, with a pair of front legs following a walk behavior, and the back legs each following their own walk behavior tag.
The unicorn rig is essentially the same as the horse rig. It's just a color swapped variant of the horse, with more voluminous hair. The horse's ice cream cone accessory is part of a swap set, and can be removed, but the unicorn's horn is always a part of the design.