Mason Smigel - Rigging Reel

I am Mason Smigel a 3D Character Technical Director with a focus on rigging, tool development, and modeling. I am currently earning a BFA in animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) and have been fortunate enough to work on numerous animated short films at SCAD in addition to personal projects. The collaboration that comes with animation always inspires me to improve.

Above is a collection of some of my best work over the past three years.

00:03 | Bartok- Personal Project
Modeling | Rigging | Look Development

I created this rig in the Animschool advanced rigging class taught by Eyad Hussein. My goal for this rig was to reach a feature film-level character rig and stay true to the original design from Anastasia.

00:15 | Hex Limit - Collaborative Project- SCAD Animation Studios
Rigging | Modeling | Pipeline

Hex Limit is the second film from SCAD Animation Studios. I was responsible for modeling the female character (Nitro Lux), and designing a base topology for all three characters. As well as creating a character and prop rigs using Rigamajig, a modular rigging system I developed for this project. My Final responsibility was to ensure we had a smooth, concise data flow through departments, which involved writing several tools for artists (alembic export and import, animation tools, and some small utilities for the lighters).

00:49 | Bearly- Collaborative Project- SCAD Animation Studios
Rigging | Pipeline

Bearly is SCAD Animation studio's premiere film. I served as the lead character TD and had responsibilities ranging from creating character rigs for Bearly and his forest friends to developing custom python tools for the team. These included the shot sculptor (seen next) and a tool to quickly populate the ground plane with foliage through an art-directed approach and simple controls.