In my spare time I've been creating and animating my very own Stitch! And I have to say, animating Stitch is possibly the most animation fun I've ever had...

I modelled Stitch from Disney model sheets, which are freely available online. Stitch's shading was built up from a series of Maya toon shaders layered on top of each other, which gave me a lot of freedom to tweak the look as I saw fit - from completely toony, all the way up to 3D lighting and shading. Maya Paint FX toon outlines were then added over the top, and heavily tweaked in post. Stitch was rigged with a series of rigging MEL scripts I developed to help me with the task; all of his limbs support squash and stretch (both automatic and manual), silhouette-tweaking with lattices, and also allow middle joints like elbows and knees to be moved up and down the length of the limb. All major controllers support space switching. Stitch's face is rigged with a series of wire deformers, which give an amazing amount of facial flexibility. But you don't care about any of this, do you - it's the animation that counts!

So, let's get to the good stuff. All criticism welcome at the normal address!

Download a Stitch animation render (MPEG-4 AVI, 7.7 Mb)

Download a Stitch mesh/rig breakdown (MPEG-4 AVI, 2.6 Mb)

Download a Stitch turnaround (MPEG-4 AVI, 2.2 Mb)