Rethinking Character Rigs

#3d #3danimation #3dart #maya #character #3dcharacter #learn3d
As someone who has experience in both rigging and animation, I wanted to rethink the typical character rig and present it to the community as a way to evolve the art. Hopefully this will allow for better collaboration between the two departments, ultimately resulting in more efficient workflows.

Here are a couple bits of additional information I didn’t have time to include in the video.

•Almost all the controls (that can be) are normalized to -10 to 10, or 0 to 10... so your animation curves will be appropriately sized with respect to each other. When real rotation units are important, for example the foot, they’re divided by 10 to make 180 = 18 to bring the curve closer to the rest of the animation.

•The animator can modify the saved hand poses by selecting the Nurbs curve that's in front of the slider. That curve handle dynamically updates with whatever hand pose is saved. In a typical production environment the senior animator would likely set those initial poses.

•I would recommend to pair this setup with a simple script that will keyframe the translation all of the controls that are visible in the current HUD view selection.

•The "Zero Pose" is in relation to the world controller. For those CharFX artists reading this, the Ziva solver would be tied to this.


I hope you find this helpful!

Tools:
Autodesk's Maya
Zbrush
Foundry's Nuke

0:00 Intro
0:32 Meet Ivan
1:12 The HUD UI
1:58 Basic Controls
3:38 Spine Controls
3:56 Hip Controls
4:08 Feet Controls
4:44 FK Arm Controls
5:17 IK to FK Blending
5:56 Hand Controls
6:36 Hand Pose Controls
7:04 Jaw Controls
7:21 Tongue Controls
7:51 Secondary Basics
8:24 Manipulating Breathing
9:07 Tremble Controls
9:31 Eye Controls
10:03 Wrap Up and X-Ray Mode