It's ALIVE!!!

I completed the bag model at the end of February 2012.  Although in terms of modeling and texturing it was complete, there was still one more process and that was to give it the controls to allow me to animate.

This process is technically called "rigging" although in plain English it basically means to add controls that allow you to move you characters arms and feet for example.
You build a skeleton for your character, very similar to how skeletons in real humans or animals work.
Once the skeleton is built you have to tell each bone what part of the model it should control. So for example you've added an upper arm bone (Humerus) to your character.  You'd want this bone to just move the upper arm section of that character.
This part of the process is called skinning.  You're attaching the polygons,  (see previous blog for explanation of what a polygon is)  to the bone.

Finally you need to add some user friendly controls that the animator can select to move all the bones and skin (polygons) around.  I guess you could compare the controls to that of a string puppet's wooden handle. And the strings and hooks that attach it to the puppet as the underlying bones and code that allow the software to know what moves what.
So after that lengthy explanation I hope you have a slightly clearer idea of what rigging is and why it's needed.

Having said all that, I'm actually not very good at rigging and I knew to have an easy time controlling the bag I'd need to give it to someone that knew how to rig well.
This was actually a worrying time because I didn't know any good riggers that were free. It wasn't in till mid April that I managed to get hold of a friend of mine, Jim Ovnik.  He's one of those people that just seems to be good at everything. Not only is he a great animator but he really knows his technical side.
He was pretty busy with lots of other things but he really pulled it out of the bag (sorry bad pun) to get me a working rig.
While I was waiting I got on with other animation that I knew didn't involve the bag.
Things like close ups of Sams face, or the end sequence with the evil new bag.

It wasn't till around June the 15th that I finally had a finished animate-able bag.  This only gave me around 20 days to get all the shots with the bag  finished, so as you can probably imagine this was quite a panicky time, especially considering the straps on the bag had to all be animated by hand!

Below is a video demonstrating some of the bags functions and a look at how the rig works.   Sorry, for some reason I decided to commentate this with my most boring voice. I promise I'll try to make a more upbeat one next time :)