In late 2008 during the writers strike, I found I had a little bit of spare time so I started work on a character that I wanted to release to the community. When I set out to design this rig, I wanted to make it easy to use ‘out of the box’. That meant no need to install any shelves or scripts to get right into using the character. It also had to update fast (IE: No fancy muscle systems or dynamics). I picked a cartoony character because I wanted the challenge of working on a gooey/stretchy rig. The name is because I’m not very good at making names and Tonga is a place I would like to visit one day.

Features:

-“Osipa influenced” facial system
-Squashy/stretchy torso that allows for ‘floating’ FK animation (IE, you can translate stuff around and it still looks cool)
-Pre-set hand poses on the palm controller for common or hard to build shapes (Thumbs up, punch, grab weapon etc). I can add more poses to the rig as needed. Feel free to make suggestions.
-FK/IK switching/stretching on arms and legs
-Full foot rig.
-Head and eyes can ‘lock’ or ‘float’ as needed.
-Spline and FK controls for the tail.

Download link

Creative Commons Licence
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License.

Special thanks to Tyler Hoolaeff for the animators perspective, and Bob White and Devan Mussato for rigging suggestions and QC. I hope you enjoy playing with it.

–Mike

Update!

It seems a few people have gotten the chance to play around with the character rig. If you want to see what some other animators have come up with, check them out below:

Walk cycle by Alex Gee

2 variations on a double bounce by user “ljekewl”

In an animation reel by Andrew Hernandez: