So, I’m pretty much a newb in terms of rigging in the professional world. I have so much to learn, but I’ve been waking up at 530 every morning to make sure I get enough time for personal study before I get to my work and schoolwork. Lately my low-points are skinning and joint placement. I also still have a lot to learn about object oriented programming.
I wanted to post up three videos, highlighting some of my current work in the hope of receiving some solid (even mean) criticism as well as some tips and workflows that have worked for others.
So, with all the fear in my head of coming out of my comfort zone and sharing my crappy work, here is some of my current personal work.
Scifi Rig:
Rigging requirements: Basically, just needed to be able to pose for the modelers Demo Reel.
Highlights: Piston Setup.
Generic Male Rig
Rigging Requirements: None, but I made it more of an animator friendly rig.
Highlights: Stretchy Squashiness
Failures: Skinning and no correctives >.>
just watched the scifi-rig video, will watch the rest later but i already have some pointers:
pivot placement of the controls in the feet are better positioned at the lowest point of the feet, to make sure that animators know when they place the feet on the ground
rotation of the hands could be connected to the rotation of the wrist controller instead of an attribute
i do like the solid controls and that it looks very clean
I have only looked at the middle video, “Generic Male Rig”, but have some feedback on that one. Even though it nice to see how far you have go with your rig, because you have chosen a very realistic model it looks very unnatural with all the cartoony poses. Maybe you can ask an animator to make a small animation and include that in the video. And if your not able to include an animation, try to pose the rig a bit more natural to make sure the viewer get a sense how it would preform in a production.
I agree with Ella about the human rig- the combination of a squash/stretch rig with the realistic model isn’t the best way to show off your skills. It might be better to work on two seperate models- one cartoony character which can show off all of the stretchy limbs etc, and then a purely realistic model which can show off decent deformation which emulates muscles and anatomy.
For the actual rig demo, one of the common things which employers find annoying is a super fast video of someone wiggling controllers about all over the place. If you’ve spent time making a cool spine system or something which has some original features then sure, it’s fine to show how it works. For standard things like arms, legs etc though it’s usually better to make some keyframes on the controllers in their extreme poses and then just scrub the timeline.
It’s hard to tell in the video- have you used twist bones in the thigh/ankle and upperarm/wrist? They’re really important for high res characters. Also, your elbow problems can easily be sorted out by adding a ‘50%’ bone and skinning to that. (A tiny bone which is ori constrained halfway between upper arm and lower arm).
I feel your pain when it comes to skinning and joint placement, they really are a pain in the ass to learn! Sometimes even with correct skinning and placement, its still impossible to get perfect results without either corrective morphs or extra deformation bones. Stefan Ehranhaus has some really cool videoswhich show his methodology for skinning human characters, he uses a few extra bones which work really well.
With all of that said, I gotta say that I’m impressed by your progress. You seem to be taking an excellent approach towards learning rigging.
I really appreciate the feedback and the suggestions. I’ve actually taken your guys advice (sorry It took me so long to reply back) and started working on a series of rigs. The first one being a realistic rig (to replace the one I have here) using Maya muscle and some extra joint construction techniques. It’s been a pretty steep learning curve, mostly because when I learn something I fill an entire notebook with it, haha.
I’m going to start working on my presentation of my rigs/tools. I found that most high quality rigging videos are mostly just high quality animation videos, lol. So either I need to start animating my rigs and rendering them or find an animator. I’ve been working on a couple for some students at school, so maybe some high quality stuff will come from that, we’ll see. Regardless, thank you for that tip.
The other rigs I plan on working on are:
Toon Rig (with actual toon character)
Game Biped Rig (unity or unreal, probably unity)
Quadruped
Bird
Creature
I figure after I get a solid rig for each I can start modulating them in PyMEL (which I still have a ton to learn).
Twiggy: Thank you so much for your feedback and mostly for your compliment. I’m still a student and the idea of being in the industry is still one of those things that feels unreachable or beyond me. It’s hard to see progress when everyday doesn’t seem like much and every video I watch of other peoples work makes me want to rip my hair out. lol I really enjoy it though and I’m better than I was, so I suppose that’s something.
I’ve switched over to Linux, to sort of add an extra layer to my learning. It’s been a learning curve but Maya’s fast and dealing with the setup of everything is fun. (setting up mp3’s was a pain, lol).
