Here’s a topic I was thinking about while driving to work this morning…
Since getting into the industry (even as a student beforehand), the focus on the animation side of things was always iteration. Get a first pass in, test it, iterate until it looks good. From a rigging aspect, we put a lot of focus on feedback from animators. The GDC roundtables and panel talks this year referred to our position on teams as a “service” role. We exist to service the animators and make their lives easier, which I definitely believe. However, in my experience at 3 studios thus far, probably the most consistent thing that I’ve heard from animators regarding feedback is no feedback at all. It seems that animators that I have worked with largely have no opinion at all regarding rig preference aside from basic needs like ik/fk and some local/global switches. They are an adaptable bunch and more often than not they have seemed more than happy to learn a new rig rather than get involved in the design process to have features that they prefer implemented. I don’t doubt that they have preferences, but for some reason they don’t seem to be all that interested in sharing them.
Is this kind of experience common at other studios? I know from the Bungie meta-rigging talk at GDC, they have animators with specific workflows and they go to great lengths to cater to those workflows, but is that an exception to the rule? As TA’s / TD’s / Riggers, we like to poke fun at animators sometimes for being needy, but are they really as demanding as we make them out to be?
My animators are not too bad but they will for sure let me know if something is broken. We tend to have character ownership here so I work directly with the animator that will be using the rig the most to design the tactile and menu controls. For instance, I have one animator that hides everything in the scene other then the mesh and he uses the rig’s UI menu for everything. I have another one that LOVES sliders, and on more that wants everything to be a tactile control, no sliders or menus. For ease of use by other animators I make sure that everything is exposed in all three ways, but I do cater the “default” layout of everything to the primary animator.
I would say my most common request is to make the rigs like biped minus everything that sucks about biped.
And then I get some special cases where the animators want to completely trash the rig, ie re-parent everything differently, and in this case I tell them, Make it look like you want in MAX and I’ll get it in game, and then I start brushing up on my transform math.
I cannot say much about rigging/animation workflows, but I have a very strong opinion about artist feedback.
From what I’ve seen, most of the artists are not interested at all in the workflow and pipeline, specially thinking about it and giving you feedback when they feel something is wrong. They find it easier most of the time to circumvent the pipeline to their own benefit, or simply ignore why somethings are there and eventually generate bugs in the final assets.
When I asked my team at the end of the project for feedback on the pipeline and tools we had used throughout the project, they were not interested really in giving me any feedback, and I got none. I had to go through calling them all to a meeting and have them talk about it among themselves to get the feedback I wanted.
I found also that, most of the time standing next to the artists while he is working works best for feedback. We call it “pirate-parroting” :laugh:
In my work with animators the most feedback I get is when something breaks or when the control scheme does not fit their usual workflow. In the example before some animators prefer having controls for everything, some prefer to have attributes in the channel box, other want a complete GUI. Some want to key everything at once, others key only specific parts of the rig.
So I suppose it depends on your animator (The more experienced animators, I have found, have a specific way they prefer to animate. Especially with a very 2D oriented background. The newer animators usually have more leeway.) At least that’s my opinion.
In my experience it’s always been on an artist to artist basis.
Some people love it and geek out about giving me feedback into our rigs. They could sit at my desk all day and tell me about things they want the rig to do. I’ll make it, then they’ll sit next to me all of the next day and tell me that it’s cool but it should also do (insert giant list of far-fetched and ridiculous requests here).
Then there’s the animators who just go with the flow and work with what they’re given. Even if they find a bug they either won’t notice, won’t think it’s a bug, or won’t say anything and will work around it until someone else notices and tells us.
Lastly there are the guys and gals who will report bugs and let us know when things really suck, but mostly just want to do their jobs and not deal with technical stuff. This is the majority at our place.
One thing I’ve found in my transition from animator to rigger here is that a lot of times the animators really don’t understand that sometimes all it takes is to ask for a feature or certain controller for them to get it. They assume it’s too difficult or too late in production to make changes and just deal with things.
we totally encourage as much feedback as we can get, afterall (and like what was mentioned above), we’re the animators client. it doesn’t matter what we like, it matters what they like.
so we have multiple rounds of testing for the rigging/skinning process, multiple meetings before we start on a ‘new’ character type, post mortem meetings, etc etc. after each show, i make sure that we resolve any problems that came up, or add any features that the majority of animators wanted for the next show.
of course, at this point with our modular rigging system, everything has been run through its paces so much, that for a ‘normal’ (biped/quad) character, the rig works as expected without any complaints. occasionally we’ll tweak a module though, and we make sure to get the animators to run it through testing as much as they can.
we do have some animators that won’t be as verbal about their needs, but we have others that make up for it.
they do know that its ok to approach us with any needs, at any time though, and we do have some ‘formal’ docs to get rig feedback on which helps the process.
Watching them work over their shoulder or just sitting within ear shot is the best way to get feedback early. Half the time animators don’t know a feature or solution to their problem is in the rig until I see them struggling and show them.
Good thread, you have to make the rounds and get the info out of them in my experience, asking for people to give you feedback results in little to none, vs pulling it out of them or even better, just open up their animation files and see what /how they are using the rig. That can be eye opener some times.
too true brad. our rigging dept sits adjacent to the animators for that exact reason.
for open season 2, one of the animators didn’t realize we had a ‘faster res’ switch until he was almost done… animated the whole show in render res mode, and didn’t even complain about the rig being too slow!
its time consuming to make docs or videos showing the latest features of a new rig, but if you can do that, it will make the communication that much better. it’s hard to find the time, but when i do have it, i like to walk around the animation dept to see how they’re doing, how stuff is being used, etc. a few key animators usually come to me with suggestions as well…
i guess as long as both sides of the equation are passionate about what they do, they’ll always strive to ‘better’ each other. ie, riggers wanting rigs that enable better/cooler animations, and animators wanting rigs to have better/faster/cooler features. if those camps talk to each other, everyone will be moving forward.
i will say though, that even with all that, you should have a filter. supervisors need to talk to each other and decide what is worth the time/budget that you have. like people said, different animators want different ways of manipulating things… (attr vs ‘joysticks’ vs multi controls… ik on something vs just fk, auto corrections vs manual, etc). its up to the animation supervisor/director to make the call on which way(s) to go, in order to stay efficient. at least for us anyway
Good thread. Feedback is always a difficult thing, and as mentioned above, most of the time all you get is… this doesn’t work. I’m kind of stuck between all of them. We design and write the pipeline so we feed the systems into the riggers then onto the animators. I try and do the rounds of the studio as much as I can as often, like Brad mentioned, the only real way of seeing how things are going and how the animators are actually using the systems is to sit over them.
We don’t have time to do tutorials or manuals, although we do try and do training sessions. The problem I find is that there isn’t time allocated in the schedules for any training… so if we say that we need to get everybody together to demo some new feature, the answer is often, ’ can’t spare the time we’re in a crunch’ or words to that effect.
We recently did a survey for all the animators, a simple on-line checkbox/comments type of thing about all aspects of the rigs and toolset and the responses were gobsmacking. Most of the animators didn’t know half of the features in the rig! They tend to just use what they know and get on with it. That said as an ex animator I still can’t get my head round it… the first thing I do with any rig is change all the channels and see what they all do, or at least make it my business to understand what I’m using.
