Cartoony Toast Rig

[sozap]

Hi there !

This is a personal project I started to work on last summer and eventually I moved on to something else, so lets share it !

Some test poses

The goal was to make a 2.5D character rig and explore some ideas to have each part of the face independent from each other like in a 2D rig :

Like the mouth that is based on a curve and a bunch of geonodes that cuts the main body rather than being dependend on topology…

Since it’s a curve it’s possible to make very different shapes without a complex rig or shape keys…

There is also some cast modifiers that allows free deformation on the whole body :

This was meant to do cheekpuffs but the controllers can be used freely for anything else.

That was also an opportunity to look into painterly/illustrative textures and effects …

I also looked into motion smears and speedlines :

That you can see in action here :

And to dive further into the making of, it started as a napkin idea I pitched to a client for some kind of advertising video. They didn’t liked it but it kinda grow on me

Some initial designs made in krita :

Some hair exploration, two of them take inspiration from the antagonist in no country for old men …

The final hair design :

Eventually I looked into making him a sidekick :

Which I also started to model :

And that’s about it ! After that I moved on to other adventures

Thank you for watching and don’t hesitate if you have any questions !

[sven2]

What a great character!
Are the arms and legs rigged with regular bones?

[julperado]

The character looks pretty cool! I’d love to see a bit more info into the rigging and geo nodes setup you used for it.

Do you think you’ll get back to it and work on the sidekick too?

[Manou]

Fun character ! The animation is awesome.

[BG_Division]

Haha very nice. I’d love to see some ‘action’ with this:

[sozap]

Thanks a bunch @sven2 , @Manou, @BG_Division and @julperado !

Here are more insight on the rig ! The core is pretty classic, like arms/legs
uses IK/FK with additional features like stretch and bend, thanks to blender’s b-bones.

Since I’ve done a lot of rigging in the past I came to make my own auto-rig based on modules. Stuff like arm, legs, car wheels… can arbitrary be put together very similarly to rigify.
It also supports things like shape keys and lattices, and I can improve it from project to projects depending on my needs.

On this character some part are very similar to the Boon and Pimento rig demonstrated in this video/post.

Also, the main parts are pretty simple, which makes rigging easier and also it allows to create other characters with the same style quickly…

The most advanced part is the mouth, which at the core isn’t that complicated either…
I uses a curve as a basis that is shaped into lips and a boolean cutter for the inner parts :

The curve is then rigged in a way that recreates the handles of the curve but with bones :

I take a lot of inspiration from that addon to incorporate the same functionality to my autorig system :

Curve rig - Blender addon

So, relatively easy stuff on the overall but we all know that the devil lies in the details …

For instance to get rig control over the radius of the curve I had to make some hacks using geometry nodes :

The trick was to use a mesh where each point represents curve’s radius, those points are moved by bones and they get sampled with geometry nodes. So basically the point’s height represent the radius of each points of the curve…

Also I wanted the inner parts of the mouth to scale with the curve, and this turned out to be some kind of a rabbit hole…

For that I used an intermediary mesh strips that is deformed along the curve.

And to make it stretches as the curve extend I had to compare the curve’s initial length and the deformed one, I even made fancy visualization tools while debugging the whole system.

Eventually I transfer the deformation of the plane to the teeth… Then I can set some influence for that or add an extra bone transform to tweak further the teeth…

From there things slowly get back to normal, the eyebrows uses the same curve rig system :

And the eyes have those 2D lattices that allows different deformations…

And that’s all I can think of right away…

@julperado

Do you think you’ll get back to it and work on the sidekick too?

Well, I moved on to something else for now, but I’d like to explore more those kind of cartoony techniques at some point, so I suppose it will come back in one way or another.

Parts of my todo includes using those characters as an opportunity to study animation but that todo is a bit dense already

Thanks everyone again !

[MrUnreal (Nick)]

Really smart work - looks great. I take it the top & bottom (middle) hair pics are based on the psycho from No Country For Old Men? Great film by the way… terrifying too.

[vantrip]

Nice work! I’m always impressed by rigs of unusual character designs like this and hope to follow suit at some point in the future. The visual style reminds me of the old Duckman cartoon for some reason (the big eyes, and lips I think). Kind of a 90’s animated commercial style for snack foods.

[sozap]

Thanks @MrUnreal and @vantrip !

@MrUnreal

I take it the top & bottom (middle) hair pics are based on the psycho from No Country For Old Men? Great film by the way… terrifying too.

Yeah it’s the ones, I had a soft spot for the middle one in the top row but I ended up doing something a bit more energetic.

@vantrip, I didn’t know about Duckman, that looks pretty good ! However I do know about Duck X Duck, I didn’t know there was such a trend around ducks in the 90ies…

Anyway, I’ll watch Duckman to catch up

[bartv (Bart Veldhuizen)]

I featured you on BlenderNation, have a great weekend!

Best of Blender Artists: 2026-8

[ahuri (Maxence Leret d'Aubigny)]

wowowow such a nice work. Ultra interesting!

[Debuk]

Was a bit in a hurry last time I saw it. But as the thread just came back up…he looks awesome sozap…

[julperado]

@vantrip

The visual style reminds me of the old Duckman cartoon for some reason (the big eyes, and lips I think)

Now I want to make a Duckman fanart hehe

@sozap

The most advanced part is the mouth, which at the core isn’t that complicated either…
I uses a curve as a basis that is shaped into lips and a boolean cutter for the inner parts :

@sozap I hope it’s ok if I borrow some of the techniques you showed on this breakdown for work

[sozap]

Thanks @ahuri and @Debuk !

@julperado, Yeah cool ! it would be intersting to see your take on those techniques if at some point you’re allowed to show some stuff !

[bartv (Bart Veldhuizen)]

You’re on the featured row!

[sorian_romeo]

lovely work

[Boder (Boh Doer IV)]

I really like this kinda ART. My only suggestion is that the toast texture is maybe too realistic for the style.

[oo_1942 (Kim)]

It’s a wonderful character.

[MarcelStocker (Marcel Luiz Stocker)]

Nice, love the expressions! Congrats!!!

[3dioot]

This is what I get for not logging into blenderartists for a while. I miss supercool stuff like this! I love it!

Thank you for the extensive breakdown and even showing inspiration. I totally dig that stuff.