Rigging for shotsculpting - techniques, advice?

Rigging
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Hi everyone - I wanted to see if anyone had any commentary that might be insightful with reference to making shotsculpting for efficient - in my case I’m thinking specifically of cloth workflows (such as a character grabbing a cloth/garment), but in general would be helpful too!

I’m wondering if there’s any esoteric workflows/tools out there for shotsculpting that I’m unaware of - in particular, is there a precedent for creating “temporary” (for lack of a better word) rigs just for manipulating part of a mesh for shotsculpting purposes? I mean, manually shotsculpting a specific set of verts with a rig, and using this as the goal of the Input attract? I can’t think of any rigging setups that might be useful except for individual controls per vert - to me it seems reasonable as opposed to using the sculpt tool, as being able to translate the verts with a control seems easier than trying to manually sculpt frame by frame. Am I on the right track in my thinking?

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Three things come to mind:

  1. Get familiar with all the non-skeletal deformers, particularly lattices, wires and sculpts. You can animate the deformers themsleves and also you can animate their contributions.

  2. Blendshapes driven by expressions or driven keys are an easy way to get your basic forms moving around. Blendshapes can get you close if you know your use case ahead of time. Blendshapes can get you close (and they are much better than managing individual verts) and then if you need to add tweaks on top they will be more tactical.

  3. Are you familiar with the idea of “ephemeral rigging”? Essentially, it’s throwaway rigging that’s there to achieve a particular effect but does not need to be baked into a complex permanent character setup.

You can rig the deformers this way, and if you create reusable setups you’ll build up a library of solutions over time

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