Marty Hon

Inside the everyday routine of a rigger for Digital Domain in Vancouver

After graduating from Columbia College Chicago with a degree in 3D Animation, Marty Hon has spent years honing her craft as a CG artist. Prior to joining Digital Domain, Hon created realistic renders and high-quality models for freelance clients, before moving into the realm of TV commercials where she contributed character and prop rigging, hard-surface modelling, texturing, animation, rendering and compositing. For the past five years Hon has been lending her talents to Digital Domain’s Vancouver studio.

08:00am After I get to the office, I start my day with a cup of tea, a light snack, and a look through my emails for updates or changes to any assets. I’ll go through each one to see if there are any notes, any new requests or schedule changes for any specific functionality for rigs that I’m assigned to.

09:30am Other than character, vehicle and prop rigs, facial transfers are also part of the rigging department’s job. Our integration department records facial mocap performance to track and generate facial masks for each shot. I’ll then create a specific facial deformation rig in Maya, using numerous inhouse plugins that can transfer the performance from the masks onto our character model. Once the rig is tested, the transfer process can be automated on our render farm. When it’s possible, I’ll send the new shots to the farm to transfer early in the morning so I can check and edit them later in the day.