Hey everybody,
Our team is starting some research to determine which auto rigging system will meet the needs of our project. We’re currently looking into the following rigging systems:
Rapid Rig 2.0. The Setup Machine 2.0. Advanced Skeleton. DpAutoRig. The modular rigging toolset based on 3dBuzz.
A few notes about our team and what we’re looking for:
We have a small characters team with a single technical animator and technical artist. We’re looking for a rigging system that is fast and flexible, but preferably modular, as we’ll have a number of different creature sizes. I’ve walked through the modular rigging videos from 3d buzz, and while these scripts/tools have proved incredibly useful in the past, I fear that the system requires too much maintenance/overhead for a much smaller team. We’ve currently been using Rapid Rig 2.0 in the short term, but this rig doesn’t appear to have enough modular functionality to support a variety of creatures. We’d like to find a balance among the systems functionality, ease of use, speed, and complexity.
I should also mention that we are a game studio, and such it would be highly preferable to use a system that distinctly separates the game skeleton from the animation skeleton.
Which of these would best fit our needs? Are there other systems you would recommend?
Thanks in advance!
Rusty
I’d download 'em if able, and do some tech tests before even looking at how nice they are to interact with.
Make sure the export skeleton is in a completely separate hierarchy (or can be ripped out easily), and doesn’t depend on segment-scale-compensation (or any other joint attributes) that your engine might not support.
We’ve had luck with Advanced Skeleton, and abAutoRig (the ‘ab’ author is really nice, too).
Hey Pat,
Thanks for getting back to me! I downloaded Advanced Skeleton and there is definitely a lot to like about the system. It has a number of really nice tools, is very modular, and supports quadrupeds out of the box. I like that it comes with a number of pre-built skeleton chains, but also allows the user to build their own skeleton chains from scratch (and still apply animation rigs to those chains as long as the labels are set up correctly). This allows the user to quickly build unique rigs, which will be very important to our project. This seems like a great feature that isn’t included in abAutoRig and a number of other auto rigging tools I’ve researched. AbAutoRig also appears to be completely bipedal as well. Is that correct? Do you know of any other auto rigging systems that easily allows the construction of a unique character from scratch in the same vein as Advanced Skeleton?
Rusty
I used Advanced Skeleton a long time ago when it was a bit limited, but people have been raving about it recently, esp for quadrupeds. But our current default biped is ab. A few animators do make quadrupeds with it by ripping it apart /combining sections as needed (scary).
I think we tried Rapid Rig, but it seemed hard to actually get the export rig into the game (because of the segment-scale dependency, or the bind rig being buried in the control hierarchy, or both… can’t remember).
Haven’t tried any others, recently. Good luck! Lemme know if you find anything cool.
You might want to take a look at MGear, the Maya version of GEAR, a rigging system developed by Jeremie Passerin for Softimage:
http://jeremiepasserin.com/blog/index.php?post/2011/07/13/MGear-beta-1
I had the chance to work with the Softimage version and so far I could produce with it ‘out of the box’, and I was able to build and tweak rigs easily and fast under a tight schedule.
DPAutorig is pretty much the 3DBuzz system, but much lighter and more organized. The setup machine is solid but not sure it’s as modular as you are wanting. advanceSkeleton and MGear seem to be more along what you have described.
Thank you for the advice everyone. I believe we’re going to go the way of Advanced Skeleton, as it meets most of our needs and seems relatively easy to wrangle for a small team of people. All of your input was greatly appreciated!