What keeps a show going? Now on its fourth season, the hit CG animated Star Wars: The Clone Wars continues to captivate the old and the young with new planets, more alien characters, new story lines and the return of favorite folks. Before anything else though, these new elements need to have some sort of frame or structure that artists can animate and paint on.

This is where Seema Gopalakrishnan and her team come in. As Rigging & Pipeline Lead on the show, she and her team work with animators in creating rigs, or “skeletons” used for animation, and in creating control systems for characters and props. She will illustrate the rigging process using General Krell -- a new Jedi character with four arms and two double-bladed lightsabers -- as an example.

In her presentation, she will also provide a broad overview of the pipeline workflow from asset build to rendering and tools that were used for rigging and animating the characters in the Star Wars universe.

Seema Gopalakrishnan, Lucasfilm Animation Singapore