On march 23rd, 2006, an anonymous reader mentioned that I “should write up a post about the history of hogan – his origins and various incarnations throughout the years.” I don’t think I’m exactly the most qualified to answer his question but I can give it a whirl.

The origin of Hogan as best I know is that some of the original Pixar guys who teach at the academy wanted a nice versatile model for their students. I believe that before they introduced hogan people were using their own models or they were using another character named Milt that had no mouth. They wanted a model that would be basic enough that the focus would be on the animation and not the actual geometry of the model. As best as I can discover, Pete Nash was the teacher that pushed for this and built Hogan. This first iteration of Hogan featured the swing jaw, an enormous torso and the mitten hands. By today’s standards, this model is bulky and the rig is not a pleasure to work with. In his day though, he served his purpose very well. His basic design has remained largely unchanged.

At this point, I wasn’t using Hogan so I can’t vouch for the improvements made during this time. Judging from the files that I have found however, even in this early stage students were tinkering with Hogan trying to improve him by adding things such as ik/fk arms, clavicle controls, a primitive blendshape head, moving controls away from the shelf and onto locators based around the model, etc. These features were added to the existing files without ever rebuilding him.

In the spring semester of 2004, Jon Collins and Wes Mandell released a major iteration of Hogan known as jw_hogan. jw_hogan was a significant step forward with Hogan. He still had a swing jaw but jw_hogan featured tweaked out geometry that was more curvilinear and he had fingers instead of the mitten hands. Other significant contributions Jon and Wes added were a UI, NURBS control handles, ik/fk matching, and the ability to save hand and facial poses. When this Hogan was demoed for us, we were summarily blown away.

After using jw_hogan for a bit, people began to have ideas for ways of improving it. Eriks Vitolins changed the control handles for the back which made it immensely more intuitive and he added another back joint. Other people began working on blendshape heads to replace the swing jaw head. there was a version that had a somewhat realistic head placed on to jw_hogan. There was a version that featured completely new body geometry that resembled a robot. There was a version that had the same head from the robot rig but it was placed on the old original Hogan rig. I’m sure that there were some other variations out there. All of these variations had their advantages but they also had their disadvantages ranging from things being broken to unpleasant rigs to not being available for everyone to use.

This is where pjlHogan was born. In the fall semester of 2004 I decided I had the rigging know-how to completely remake Hogan using the best of all the parts that were available. I wanted to completely remake Hogan partly because I enjoy rigging but also to get rid of all the layers of revisions other people had made. There was one revision with a blendshape head that was very nice, but it had 3 and a half megs of duplicated scriptnodes that were completely unused. I wanted to avoid that situation and create a fast and stream-lined Hogan. So I took the head from the robot Hogan which featured a much wider mouth but more articulate and pleasing blendshapes, I took both the body geometry from the old Hogan and jw_hogan, and I based the NURBS control handles off of Eriks’ revision of jw_hogan. I then created my own skeleton, added a few blendshapes to the head, and rigged it using my setup which obviously I am partial to.

i passed this first version of pjlHogan out to my close friends and we used it for an assignment. During and after working on that animation, I received a list of what could be improved. From the notes I made a multitude of adjustments. I fixed the ik/fk match (the initial one was pretty far off from being a match), I moved several preference controls that were scattered around on other controllers into one controller. I made it so that you could switch body geometry types on a per part basis instead of the entire model. The last major revision that I added was the ability to switch hand types from the mitten hands to the jw_hogan hands.

That was unfortunately the last I saw of Hogan. After I had made my version, I got hired at DNA Productions and I haven’t kept all too up to date with what’s happened to him. There was kind of a replacement for Hogan that appeared recently however. A group of students (Leif Jeffers, the amazingly multi-talented Morgan Loomis, Peter Starostin and Neal Thibodeaux) got together to create a public rig for the internet called Norman. Before releasing it in the wild, they put it through the paces in the Pixar classes. After using it for a bit, the teachers approaced Leif and asked if he would be ok with it being a replacement of sorts for Hogan, an internal rig that only those in the Pixar class would have access to. So, although he was not originally designed to replace anything, this absolutely exceptional student rig did. Norman looks very similar to Hogan but you can see that this is Hogan ten years from now when he’s going in for his first interview all dressed up in nice clothes decked out to get a six figure salary. Though I am a huge fan of Hogan, what these guys have created is stellar.

Over the course of all these changes, one thing has remained the same: Hogan is an extremely flexible character. His appeal is that he is anything. Over the years he’s been a pirate, a crook, a mad scientist, a dork, a ladie’s man, a business man, a mom, a patient, a schemer and a winner. No two people will use Hogan in the same way for the same assignment. He’s a perfect visual for imagination.

Hopefully that answers the question of where Hogan came from. If anything here is incorrect, please email me or leave comments and I will gladly fix my mistakes.