I’m an animator most of the time, but I have come to a point where I feel learning to rig would really benefit me. I have dabbled before with rigging in Maya and some MEL, and I’m really looking forward to this as a learning experience.
So far I have modelled the character - I want something like DummyMan, but with the facial control in rigs like Norman. Also I have animated alot with Biped, so I’ll be influence by that, too.
After I have done the basic rig, I am thinking of making a higher res version of him, if only to learn about using low poly proxy meshes in rigs, to speed up animation. I would also like to experiment with some different controls in the future, like the control free facial rig by Paolo Dominici. The concept is really interesting to me. I don’t know why, but I don’t like facial GUIs, I’d rather control more directly like in the video. I would be interested to try and set something like that up with the whole body, not just the head. Again, one day
Anyway, here is the character - I’d love to hear as much critique as you can throw at me thus far. I’ll keep this thread updated with progress as I work on him.
Not too be rude, but honest, the dude is super unappealing and I would click away from the page as fast as I could if I saw it on Creative Crash or something like that. The loops on the face aren’t bad but his face is just too flat. As for the Ctrl free rigging, I actually e-mailed Paolo about his rig last year. He said it’s just tricking out the transform matrix in Maya, pretty over my head at the time and his English isn’t top notch(doesn’t really matter) but as I looked into it it wasn’t too practical, kind of a lot of work for the same amount of control.
I’d be interested to see more of your rig. The mesh itself looks pretty light so I imagine your scene would evaluate pretty well, but that’s probably the most I’d comment on the actual geometry. It doesn’t look like your intention with the body is to accurately represent deformations, so I would think that as long as your rig is good and user-friendly you’re on target. But again, hard to say without seeing the actual rig:laugh:
I’ve read a lot of books, web pages and watched numberous videos on rigging, and by far the best starting point is Animator Friendly Rigging Animator Friendly Rigging – shhLIFE! by Jason Schleifer. If you need to get to grips with some of the basics then hit up rigging101.com first. Both these are Based around Maya.
