Luxo Jr.

In this project, I rigged a model of a lamp using inverse kinematics (IK). The project is based off of the most famous character from one of my favorite animation studios: The Pixar Lamp (Luxo Jr.).

First, I began by finding a very basic lamp model - which was already seperated into 4 parts: the head, the upper neck, the lower neck, and the base. From those parts, I created joints that connected from the base of the lamp, to the midpoint of the neck, to the head, and one past the head (so I could see which way the lamp was facing). After, I parented the joints to their respective parts of the lamp. With the joints in place, I connected the head and the base joint via an IK handle, so that I would not have to move every individual joint if I wanted the head to move correspondingly. In order to make the rig more user friendly, I created some controls and parented them to the specific joints.

Below is a picture of the lamp, its joints, and its controls:

Here is a short demo of the lamp’s IK controllers:

After finishing the lamp’s rig, I created a short animation of the lamp jumping. Using only basic keyframes, I created this short gif from a playblast of the jumping lamp animation:

I had a blast creating this project. Having grown up with Pixar classics like Toy Story, The Incredibles, and Wall-E, I was excited to see the basics of what goes behind creating such amazing characters. This project taught me a lot about the basics of rigging up a basic character with joints and handles. I also got to dabble into some basic keyframe animations using the timeline.

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