Manticore WIP critiques and suggestions

Hi all! I’ve been rigging this creature for a while and your opinions on it is highly appreciated!
I am hoping to incorporate this into my creatureTD reel, But I suppose I need to show off tool building in rigging reels now-adays too?

Looking good Alex! nice to see a new rig, the wings look solid and the scap/neck is holding up well, I would spread some weights on to the head a little bit though just so it doesn’t go 100% dead there when the neck moves, think about where those muscles are attaching.

Will look at it more closely later.

Hi Brad! Thanks for your input. You are right about the musculature. Here I’ve recorded a deformation test of the creature.
https://vimeo.com/45182075

I have updated the rig if anyone’s interested:

Good update, the video speed was a little fast to catch some of the detail but I like that you added in compression poses for the legs and the auto fold wings looked like they worked well.
Much improved over the first demo for sure.

Nice work on the wings and tail and back musculature!

You might want to tighten the weighting on the lower forelegs, it seems a bit rubbery to my eyes, but it may just be the stretchiness in the rig.

If you’re going to demo the rig for your reel, it’s a good idea to practice a few time and avoid some of the awkward test poses that always come up when you demo the controls (in a squishy rig these are always really easy to create, so it’s espcially important to watch out for there). Folks here are used to mentally compensating for those sorts of things but less techy audiences may assume the rig is broken or you don’t have good eyes. I like to do short pose-to-pose animations where i’m actually posing the character instead of demoing control boxes - you get the subliminal impact of a nice character and a strong pose reinforcing your rigging mojo for the audience…

Thank you for the suggestion Theodox! But I giving a break to the manticore rig for now and decided to revamp my rigging reel:

I gave the wings more importance than the manticore rig itself. the entire video comes to exactly 3 minutes long.