D-O

I've wanted to make this droid ever since seeing this little guy roll out on stage during Star Wars Celebration 2019. While he didn't have a huge part in the movie, I really loved his quirky and cautious personality, and it was nice to have another droid who could fully speak and express themselves beyond just their raw motions, poses and whistles/beeps.
Modeling D-O itself was not too much of a difficult task, however it was a pain to find good enough reference of greebles and such for the back of his head. I actually managed to snap some pictures of a toy version of him from Disneyland to clearly see what was going on back there. Similarly to R2, I wanted to have some form of a rig that would allow D-O to move and articulate just as he would be expected to in the movies.
The rig was a bit of a challenge as I was doing this all with vanilla maya and no tools to rely on. Given that most of the joints are rigid it was fairly straightforward, the only troubling part was properly rigging his wire/cables. I wanted them to be dynamically driven so I used nHair for the antennae on his head, and a wire deformer (converted to clusters) for the cable that extends from the back of his neck down the main arm.
Additionally I set up procedural jiggle animations through custom expressions, driven by a single value on his root controller, just to give all controllers a little bit of jitter during animation.