Ball with a tail

You have seen the planning for this animation in my previous post, so now I'll give you an update on my progress.
I had to make a decision between modelling and rigging my own ball or to go with a free rig. I had one already, but it has it's weak points so I did some research to try and find a more functional and easy rig to use for the task in hand. (I spent quite some time on this, since there is such a poor selection of free rigs for 3dsMax.)
After some time I found a blog that actually had a decent selection of rigs for max, so I will definitively be using this site in the future!

For this task I found this rig;


( Image and rig taken from: http://rigsarena.blogspot.com/2011/08/ball-tail.html )


I thought it looked really simple, easy to use and I liked the visual look of it as well.
But when I tested it I found several flaws with it.. The squash and stretch kind of worked, meaning it did squash, but not stretch.. Which would make this a pretty boring animation piece.
It also became apparent to me that it was not even a ball, it was more.. Egg-shaped.. So I did a quick block with it, but decided to throw it all away and start over from skratch.

The rig I already had was one my friend, Daniel had sent me earlier this summer. I had tried it out once before, so I kind of knew what I needed to sort out. The rig was apparently from the same site, and that was convenient. Here is the rig:


( Image and rig taken from: http://rigsarena.blogspot.com/2011/08/ball-tail-advance-rig-3ds-max.html )

The only problem with this one I found during my blocking. The rig would not rotate. Or, to be exact the ball rotated, but the tail did not follow. But fortunately a quick "linking-experiment" solved this issue, so I decided I would continue animating with this one.
(The only thing I don't like about the look of this rig is the fact that the tail is separated from the body. Had I made one myself I would have modelled it differently, but then again; By using a free rig I save time that I then can use on the actual animation and I thought that was a more reasonable decision..


Now, let's move over to something more entertaining (hopefully).
I have been animating for the last two days and I did not post any work in progress for you to look at yesterday, due to a social event with my fellow MA-students.
(We took a break from work and went for a pint at the Hub. Turned out to be quite inspirational towards the "sing and dance" animation we will be doing later on in the course..)

Anyway, here are two wip_videos of the ball with tail task:



And the latest one:



As you can see in the first clip I have struggled a bit with the rig, but it's getting better. There are some controls on the rig that are supposed to help you add personality (for insatance a feature that allows you to squash and stretch to either side to sort of point the ball towards a direction, without rotating it. But it took some time before I figured out how to work with/around them.. They will mostly be left unused, I don't want to end up losing control of the poses..)

So that is where I am at on this task.
I'll continue working on it tonight and tomorrow I thought I'd go out and do some more pose-sketching.