For Those about to Rig - Part -3

part-2 continuation..

Responsibilities of the Rigger when rigging for production

 If you want to become well known rigger you need to start thinking from the animators point of view. Understanding the animation requirements and the animator’s requirement is the keynote for the rigger to provide the best rig. A good rig reduces animators stress and gives the best end result.

Set the project to appropriate working directory

• When you receive the model don’t forget to check for proportions, anatomy, mesh topology.
  
• Always look at the storyboard and understand from the animation point of view.
  
• Make sure the Model has the right scale.
  
• Check for the UV’s whether it’s fixed or not if it’s not, pass it to the texturing artist.
  
• Keep up the file versions in order to avoid confusion.
  
• Check up with Maya system unit scale settings based on the project.
  
• Check out for the scale chart before you begin.
  
• Communicate with modeling and texturing artist for model, texture requirements.
  
• Freeze the transformation for the model.
  
• Before you start creating joints for the final rig.
  
• Do the test rig to see your model deforms properly.
  

This will avoid redoing the work.

• Do not create too many joints until it’s really required.
  
• Name the joints in order.
  
• Orient the joints freeze the transformations.
  
• Create the Proper grouping order.
  
• Freeze transformations for the control curves and name them properly.
  
• Lock and hide the attributes, which is not needed for the animation.
  
• Lock and hide unwanted control curves.
  
• Delete unwanted history.
  
• Delete unused curves.
  
• Delete unused objects.
  
• Delete layers, which are not necessary.
  
• Keep the outliner window clean.
  
• Keep the facial UI simple and accessible.
  
• Create Ik handles before skinning.
  
• Create an attribute for switching the model display Low to High.
  
• Organize your blend shape groups and separate them as and name them as phonemes / expressions.
  
• Do not create too many Expressions/Maya Expression system will slow down the performance.
  
• Automate the process which are repeating often to make your work flow easier.
  
• Automate some of the controls, which will make animators life easier.
  
• Create a Brief note about your Rig.
  
• Do the test animations of all the extreme posses.
  

Do the final quality check once you are through with above mentioned points

Thats all folks Happy Rigging!...

For Those about to Rig - Part -2

part-1 continuation...

Before you start doing the rigging process, always make sure that you are communicating with texturing artist too to confirm whether the UV’s are proper. This avoids re doing the skinning part. Because, if you have your UV’s fixed properly on your model it makes the skinning process much easier (you can mirror your weights on the opposite side just like the way you can do your modeling)

There are two types of rig that we get to work on in the projects. One is known as Character Rigging the other is Prop Rigging. Props are the non-living things like a Coffee Cup, Rope, Bench, Telephone...Etc but these props also needs to be rigged properly for the animators to handle them easily. Rigger needs to understand each and every prop and its behavior and how its going to get interacted with the scene and he has to make sure the pivot points and the grouping, naming, all, needs to be done properly for each and every single prop which is getting rigged. Because, some times there will be too many props in one scene so, everything needs to be named and grouped in a right way to avoid unnecessary confusion. 

Props are always fun to rig for the beginners and sometimes even for the professionals too, because some of them are very simple to start up with and some are really challenging. Even for props we can have two ways to do the rigging. For example, to rig a coffee cup, simply we can have a control near the handle to animate the cup. This will be the simple rig and it can be used in the realistic type of animation but for cartoon looking Animations we need to create another kind of rig for the same coffee cup. We just have to add few Deformers to make the cup bend or stretch and squash. 

When it comes to the world of rigging and animation, the rigging or animation process is split into two styles. It can be either realistic or toony. According to that the rigger or the animator will add the necessary controls and motion to it and get the best-expected results. 

When your creating human or an animal (also known as biped and quadruped) rig’s it’s a must fact that you have to understand the anatomy of them well and also how their inside muscles and other elements will react based on the movement of each body parts. This special observation approach provides you the realistic results and makes it more believable when we look at it. 

More than just adding the basic controls for the realistic characters either biped or quadruped provide some extra controls for the area which can give you the realism like muscles on the hand that slides near the shoulder blade when it moves and creating breathing controls for the character so that you can show the detail of the chest area that expands a little when it breaths even for the arms, wrist, elbows, knees in all these area’s you need to provide special attention to it to give such believable deformations and controls. 

Finally providing the facial expressions gives the special ability to your character and more close interaction to the audience more than just moving around, it lets the character to express his feelings.

go to part-3..

For Those about to Rig - Part -1

Hello Folks!  

                Let me say my warm welcome to the folks who enters into the area of Rigging. Almost six more years over for me in Rigging and still working on.. Damn I wish I may work with Binku Mathews in the future.. Who is he..??  He was my colleague My Team Head a Good friend and my Anger Management therapist anyway loads of thanks to this guy I’ve learnt a lot about Rigging from him. I thought this small tutor that I have done could be helpful to the one who is willing to learn about Maya Rigging. Soon I will be posting some interesting rig workarounds..

Hope this helps u in anyways.. Cheers!

MAYA RIGGING      (Character Setup)  

Introduction 

Very Interesting and most challenging and a special subject to work with it requires your creative and technical, Observation skill set to complete this process

Rigging or Character setup is nothing but giving life to the characters provided with some Controls to make animators life easy. Rigging comes just before the animation stage. When the character or prop model is created, it cannot be animated until the rigging gets over because it remains as static model and it's impossible to animate the model just by moving the vertices, it requires Skeleton structures to bend or deform the model. 

Maya Provides Various Rigging tools to get the results that you want. Understanding these tools is very important for the beginners. 

Concepts &Production Workflow

Skeletons (also known as joints and bones) are the important objects that are available in most of the 3d applications to simulate the real human skeletons and also there are different Deformers such as bend, stretch, squash, …etc. to simulate the different deforming effects. 

First key thing is that the person who wants to become a rigger is to understand the Human and Animal Anatomy well (Human and Animal Rigging methods are also known as biped and quadruped Rigs) and he also needs to have in-depth understanding of the muscle deformations and the behavior of the muscle system to get the desired results. It’s also very important for the rigger to know about the mesh flow of the geometry, which is called mesh topology (There should be a good two-way communication between the modeler and rigger). 

It is the modeler’s responsibility to give the right model with right number of polygons and points placed in the right places; for example where ever the surface need to be bent (such as the arm pits, elbow wrist, knee, ...Etc) or deformed, should have the enough number of points to control the deformation in a right way. 

It is also the riggers responsibility to check the model first whether it has the polygon distributed correctly and has the enough number of points to get the right deformation. Remember it's always better to check the model first before you blindly start working on the rig. This avoids re-doing the rigging process especially when your working on the bigger / multi projects in the production houses. 

go to part-2..