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..