I tend to see people have one of two preferred rigging styles. One style is to set up Set Driven Keys/Expressions/Wire Parameters for things, and then create a UI with sliders or other controls. These rigs can get incredibly complex with tons of sliders and abilities (everything from a slider control for each finger/knuckle, to animator-adjustable angles for heel-toe roll, etc.). The other style is the ‘tactile’ style, where the bones are controllers, maybe there are master controller that control an FK chain though (such as at the head, and chest, which control the neck chain and spine, respectively). The fingers, to relate to the above example, would just be rotated, and heel-toe animation would be done by rotating the foot by one of three pivots (toe, ball, heel). Obviously every good rig needs to be able to copy poses, etc.
Now, I know the ideal answer is ‘both’, but I’m curious what you prefer to make, but most importantly, what you (and your animators) like to use. Though I am a technical animator in occupation, I don’t have much of an animation background, so my experience is limited.
Personally I prefer to make and use the latter type, something more along the lines of Biped/CS (it is a POS but I am just using it as an example rig here), or even better, [w]PuppetShop[/w]. While all the ‘procedural’ controls are cool in the first rig type, I’d much rather just rotate something to rotate instead of scrub a slider or Channel Box row.
Maybe I’m crazy and this distinction doesn’t exist (my experience is limited and I may certainly be getting a skewed view based on demo reels), but I’d like to hear thoughts.
I, and the animators I’ve worked with prefer a more tactile rig. I’d much rather spend the majority of my time looking at, and working in the scene on the actual character than digging through layers of collapsible rollouts and sliders.
When it comes to feet I almost always use the ‘slider’ or spinner control approach. Having so many pivots in a small area (ball roll, heel pivot, toe pivot, side to side pivots, twists, etc… etc…) gets way to crammed to try and place that many locators or other controls physically in the scene. It’s nice to be able to look at your scene and actually see your character instead of a spaghetti mess of curves and controls.
So yeah, like you said… a nice mixture of both. Tactile for the broad strokes, and sliders for the fine detail.
In my animating experience (though strictly academic) I’ve personally definitely preferred a more tactile approach. It feels much more intuitive to me than sitting behind a bunch of sliders. Obviously it is still necessary to use various types of controllers for establishing ranges of motion and whatnot, though.
I like using sliders for complex movement systems - like bending all of the fingers at once, or an automated heel-ball-toe roll - and I like tactile controls for things that make more sense that way - moving an arm, rotating the head, etc.
Basically, if I can’t look at the tactile control and immediately know what it does, then I consider making it a slider with a descriptive label. And conversely - if I find myself needing to make multiple sliders for something that could be done with a single rotate or translate control then I’ll consider doing it that way instead.
There’s really no hard and fast rule though. It just comes down to what your animators feel most comfortable with and whatever gets the animation work done fastest and easiest.
I find most of the companies that I rig for want the tactile methods more, but they do like tools like PEN Attribute Holder for the hands where often they can get a way with stored poses to get them close and then just have to tweek a few sliders to get exactly what they are after. I will some times now show several of the secondary controls in the feet and do the same but leave the controls that are used the most as control objects on the character. The current set of character that I’m working on the client didn’t want this and wanted all the foot controls tactile but liked the hand controls as sliders. So, my usual starting point for animators is to put all major controls on screen and put a the secondary controls in rollouts as slider/spinners.
Being a technical animator more so now than an animator, I still prefer the tactile solution when actually animating. I have had much experience in the past working on complex control rigs along with the additional dialogs and sliders but being an animator working in games I prefer the simplistic approach to get my work done.
We use biped primarily and in cases we need more complex solutions we have built rigs using a combination of both biped and bones. We do have tools here or there to quickly control things such as fingers and morph targets but the simplicity in the rig aids us in being much more productive.
I much prefer tactile for game rigs as there’s less to fiddle around with when prepping the model for export.
I do have to say though that I can’t beat sliders for the more detailed tweaking (ie. face and fingers).
I tend to mix and match…echoing what PEN said…sometimes part of a rig
needs lots of smarty pants math to make it work…animators don’t seem to
care about smarty pants math, so I hide that and give them a slider or joystick.
Other rigs just scream out to be a direct-control(tactile). Sometimes
ease-curves are a good compromise to slider based stuff. Ultimately, it’s
what the animators are comfortable with, or if I think they’ll break the rig I’ll
give them an indirect control to keep my stuff safe.
A lot of time I find myself doing both. I’ll set up a tactile control that allows animators an easy way to block out and animate, then I just instance that animation controller over to a set of sliders that give them the fine detail control that they need.
Prime example would be a hand setup with the PEN holder thats instanced over from the finger controllers. This allows the animator to either grab the fingers and get their posing, then go to the sliders to tweak and save out poses.
We use CS/Biped here now, but will be looking to replace it in the future. the replacement, however, will be more tactile than UI driven. I am pretty much in agreement that the tactile approach is great for blocking. I do feel that you can get the fine details with a tactile approach, but I like to give my animators an option to use an interface- It’s what I did with a facial animation tool, and it was well received.
Yeah I certainly prefer both options being at my fingertips, regardless if I’m going to only use the sliders on one or two areas and tactile the areas with greater mass.
If you guys haven’t dabbled with it yet, check out Cryptic AR. There’s a bunch of neat things in it and while it may be overkill (or not? I haven’t been so fortunate as to dabble with many AAA company rigs), having multiple animators on the team will probably lend its use to at least someone.
Good answers, guys. I guess something I didn’t take into consideration is how much time will be spent with the rig and how. I suppose for hand-keying cutscene animation, a good finger-slider/pose interface would save lots of time. But since we have lots of different rigs and creatures, and most of our human/bipedal animation is derived from mocap, I haven’t heard our animators complain so I assume its good (and boy do our animators complain, we’ve really spoiled them).
I also wasn’t considering facial animation, since that almost always gets some sort of specialized UI/setup.
We use CS/Biped here now…
Blasphemy! You have too many TA’s for that!
If you guys haven’t dabbled with it yet, check out Cryptic AR.
I’ve always been a bit scared/wary of Cryptic, I’m sure it is very useful at Cryptic, but I don’t know enough about it to really come down with a technical impression. It is certainly nice for animation, but I’ve only evaluated it for a day or two at my last job.
[QUOTE=Rob Galanakis;470]
Blasphemy! You have too many TA’s for that!
[/QUOTE]
We’re working on a replacement, but when all you deal with is bipedal motion, it’s easy to succumb to its promises and ease of use for mocap Besides, our clients (the animators) are hesitant to change until we come up with something with all of the CS features (and more! they always want more…), and none of the bugs.
Besides, our clients (the animators) are hesitant to change until we come up with something with all of the CS features (and more! they always want more…), and none of the bugs.