Questions to help Student Study on Rigging

Rigging
1

Hey, I am currently in my Honours year of studying Computer Art at the University of Abertay Dundee in Scotland.

I am studying how to effectively Rig 3D creature characters for game and animation by obtaining influence from current artistic/technical techniques of creature creation, as well as scientific methods such as the study of animal structure and palaeontology.

As part of my dissertation I am contacting industry figures conducting interviews and I was wondering if anyone would be willing to help me by answering some questions about your experiences as a Technical Artist?

If you have any questions or would like to contact me- marniefaulkner@gmail.com

Thanks very much in advance for your time

Marnie =]

Questions for Industry Technical Artists

  1. What is the typical interaction between you as the Technical Artist and the Modeller? Please detail the level of involvement you have before/during/after character model creation and identify any impact this has on a model’s fitness for purpose.

  2. What is the typical interaction between you as the Technical Artist and the Animator? Please detail the level of involvement they have before/during/after rig creation and identify any impact this has on a rig’s fitness for purpose.

  3. Please identify any features of a rig you feel are vital to help make an animator’s job easier and state why they are important.

  4. Looking back on your personal experience creating rigs, please detail any methods you have found to be particularly useful/ cause particular difficulties.

  5. After the skinning is completed, do you fully test the rig ready for animation or does this role fall on the Animator? If you test yourself, are there any particular trials you carry out and in your experience, are these personal approaches or general techniques used by technical artists?

  6. Please detail the process that would be undertaken if an Animator felt a rig did not meet the requirements of the project. As a Technical Artist, is this something you have experienced occasionally or frequently?

  7. Please detail any differences in your expectations of a rig for games compared to animation. As a Technical Artist, is this something that requires your consideration or does this fall under a different role?

  8. As a Technical Artist, please detail how your research preparations and methods for rigging an unusual character/creature differ from your approaches for a more common character type?

2

I am sure many people will have many variations on these questions as the roles change dramatically between studios, but I’ll give you my experience from the places I have worked.

1/ as part of a structured pipeline we determine where and how models are saved out and exported etc and generally manage a large part of their source control handling. We deal with any tool requests and support any tools they use etc. We also work closely to make sure that topology is correct for the type of animation the model will be used for. On the flip side to that, during the connecting stage we make sure that everything that comes through and gets modelled is realistic in terms of time to rig etc.

2 / as above in terms of saving/exporting/source control. Early on in the projects we work hand in hand with the animator to make sure the rigs we create gives them exactly the control they need in a way that makes sense for them. Generally a rig cannot be liked down as much as we would like as projects have a habit of changing over time, so rig updates are a regular occurrence in the first half of any project.
Apart from the rig side of things, we are responsible for developing animation tools which will improve the quality/speed of the animation as well as deal with any technical issues the animator may need help with.

3 / any mode switching always needs matching scripts. So for instance, any ikfk switch functionality should have the ability to match between one another seamlessly. Any ‘auto’ behaviour should always have an on/off toggle (again, keeping the current spatial transform is good practice when switching between those modes). Generally I find that more features does not make a rig better, the animators I have usually worked with want a rig that is streamlined and easy to use. With that in mind, and fancy behaviour should be an additive layer to the rig, not a mandatory one.

4 / the mot obvious and simple one but extremely important is object management. It sounds petty but good naming conventions, well structured hierarchies and grouped objects make understanding the rig much better. It also helps massively when writing rig support tools etc.
Locking of non-animatable controls is a must, anything that should not be touched should be hidden or locked or both. In a production environment rig stability and reliability is king.

5 / I will useally give a rig a good testing over, I don’t animate particularly well but I know enough to be able to test the rig generally. Obviously everyone works slightly different so it’s key to have someone else (an animator) do a second pass of testing.
I find it’s always worth doing tests yourself even if you cannot animate just so you can get the obvious issues out the way before passing the testing elsewhere.
Usually as a rig is developed with an animator segments of it will probably be testing throughout the prototyping stage anyway.

6 / The projects themselves have a tendency to change, so for me personally, changing the rig throughout production is very much the norm. Whenever animators come up with ideas for rig improvements or things that will speed up their work through the rig this is also taken on board and worked on. It’s usually balancing up the work involved in doing the changes, the knock on effects those changes will have and the benefits people will get from them.
But certainly, altering a rig through production is a regular occurrence in the first half of a project and less of an occurrence in the latter part.

7 / the only difference between game/film is the deformation types you can use. In game your usually limited to bones and shapes, whilst in film you can deform geometry however you like.
In terms of the control rigs though there is little difference, we can still use simulation/cloth/rigid bodies etc to control the control rig, it’s just that the end result needs to be in a form the game can understand.

9 / research usually involves looking at how something moves and how the game expects them to move, then working out the cleanest and most efficient way to reproduce that type of behaviour. Depending on the importance of the character/creature that might be half an hour doing YouTube and image searches or it could be a couple of days with a slow motion camera and throwing together some prototypes etc.

Hope at helps a little.

Mike.

3

Hey Mike,

This is great, Thank you very much for taking the time to fill these in for me it helps a great deal :slight_smile:

Can I ask, would you mind if any of this is quoted in my dissertation?

Thanks

Marnie =]

4

Feel free to quote any of that. I would strongly suggest getting a few other people’s answers first though, as I am sure others will have different experiences to mine!

5

It depends on the modeler. If s/he is experienced and I trust them, it tends to be OK to let them do their thing with minimal back and forth. Otherwise, you should be going back and forth, testing out deformation, explaining how the rig and animation is going to work, etc., especially for important characters.

  1. The animator needs to explain what s/he plans to do with the character’s animation up front, so a rig can be designed to support it. Then, there will always be some back and forth to design a rig that will allow the animator to best achieve that animation.

  2. Whatever the animator asks for, combined with new technologies and ideas the TA finds on her/his own. Since these are both pretty universal, or vary per-animation team, I won’t go into specifics.

  3. Use a rigging middleware- it is usually not necessary to build a rig for every character yourself. Always spend time up-front getting to know and training the modelers so they design good meshes. Become best of friends with your animation team so you can get on the same page with what they ask for and the language they use to describe it. Build in iteration time to your estimates. Don’t “make things work” in the rigging phase- make sure meshes are modeled and designed correctly up front.

  4. I make sure things look relatively good but the ultimate result must be in the hands of the actual artists. I test it to the point where I’m not wasting their time by finding obvious flaws, and not eroding my credibility by asking them to test something that obviously doesn’t work.

  5. This happens to various degrees on every rig. You must expect animators will have feedback and ask for changes and you should build this into your time estimate. Sometimes rigs must be completely redone- in this case, figure out why the first one missed the mark, make sure it doesn’t happen again, and redo the rig.

  6. Rigs destined for offline rendering have more options available- they can use anything the software has. Realtime rigs have a limited set of techniques that can be used- more complex techniques (driven bones, simulated bones, etc.) must be built into the game engine so cannot be used on every project/tech. A TA must know exactly what he can and can’t use when rigging for games, whereas a TA for offline rigs must know everything and anything the 3D program can do so he has the most ways to solve a solution.

  7. I spend more time going over requirements with the animator (or animators, if it is something the animator hasn’t used before). They just require more thinking and testing, making sure joints move as expected and animators have the controls they need to achieve what they want.

6

Thank You Mike

No worries I have posted on a few forums as well as having Interviews with Industry Figures in the area so I will have a broad range to take from =]

7

Rob- thank you very much for filling this in for me, I have quite a few replies from Technical Artists from games companies now, you wouldn’t happen to know any good sources to get a set of questions for animators answered would you? Also I don’t really have any sources of people working in animation instead of games.

Guys I’m having trouble skinning at the moment, the switch between Maya 2008 & 2011 has caught me up, do you know of any good resources I could use to learn how to skin properly? I’ve looked at some and I understand what the changes are but nothing seems to be working for me, random influences affecting the whole body keep appearing and will not be moved no matter what I do, changes to the component editor where now all the joints are shown rather than just the ones influencing the verts selected, I’m struggling more than I have time for!