education Archives - Rigging Dojo

In this series, our friend and mentor, Jeremy Ernst goes through cleaning up a model purchased from a marketplace and shows the complete skinning game character for Unreal Engine.

Model used can be found here:
https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/character/fantasy-character/dominique-girl

Song title: Passengers.
Artists: chromonicci
Courtesy of Riot Games
https://www.leagueoflegends.com/en-us/news/community/riot-music-creator-safe-guidelines/

Description

This video series goes through:
Cleaning up a model before placing joints and skinning
Joint placement and orientation fundamentals
Skinning with ngSkinTools 2
Importing your mesh and skeleton into UE5
Retargeting animations to your mesh
Setting up dynamics (cloth, physics)
Getting the character playable

Maya to Unreal 5 Character Skinning and Setup

Part 1: Cleaning up the Model
In this video, I will go through cleaning up a model purchased from a marketplace to be better for skinning.

Part 2: Joint Placement Fundamentals
I’ll go over some fundamental concepts with joint placement, joint orientation, and rotate orders.

Part 3: Joint Placement Timelapse

Part 4: Joint Placement Overview , I’ll briefly go over the initial joint placement I landed on for this character.
For more information on mGear: / mgearriggingframework

Part 5: Skinning The Upper Body
I will begin skinning the upper body using ngSkinTools2. ngSkinTools: https://www.ngskintools.com/ Installing: https://www.ngskintools.com/v2/installing/

Part 6: Skinning The Hands Let’s skin the hands and fingers while listening to some chill beats.

Part 7: Skinning The Hair
will skin the rest of the upper body parts, and skin the hair. As mentioned in the video, here is the blog post on creating proxy meshes: https://www.jeremyernst.com/devblog/2…

Part 8: Skinning The Lower Body
In this part, I will skin all of the lower body pieces, except for the cloth.

Part 9: Skinning The Cloth
I’ll focus on skinning the cloth. (sorry for the audio quality on this one, not sure what happened!)

Part 10: Joint Placement Edits
After skinning the cloth, I realized some of the joints could be better placed. In this part, I will edit the joint placements of the cloth and tidy up any weights as a result.

Part 11: Building a Hair Sim Mesh
I’ll be doing the last touches in Maya to get our mesh ready for export into Unreal Engine.

You can find the extended playlist on Jeremy Ernst YouTube channel where he moves the character into Unreal Engine.

Thank you for letting us publish the rigging and skinning section and for being a supporter of us and of sharing rigging knowledge.

Update: 2018

Entire video set, scripts and extra tips are now available as a free online course.

https://ondemand.riggingdojo.com/store/vLpV26La

Grateful:

Here are the slides from my talk at GDC. None of it could have happened, the talk or me using Filmbox years ago and more with out the man, the legend the mega awesome Jason Parks. Thanks for all the work and effort wrangling us all together for the bootcamp and fitting me in to the packed schedule of great speakers.

And I wouldn’t have physically been there without everyone at Rigging Dojo for taking care of the trip, thanks Josh and Chad and our great community of mentors and students.

On with the Show!..er..um..Slides:

You can download the PDF here from the GDC Vault.

Note: Due to the difficulty of live demo during the time I had to present, I recorded detail videos walking through the tips on each slide. To get the videos you can contact me with Vault access proof (screen shot of you logged in to my talk,) and I will send you a download link.

What people are saying about the presentation (super big cookies for that)!

“Just watched your talk on the vault. Packed with invaluable information! A+”

“… this was very useful for me as an animator who has to work with mocap regularly.”

“… I have been using it for years and pretty much every single one of his tips were new to me….will save me countless hours in production.”

@twitter – #hackmobu

GDC Slides with
Speaker notes: click the gear and choose speaker notes to see more details and step by steps

Session Name	Technical Artist Bootcamp: Hacking MotionBuilder: 10 Things You Aren’t Doing but Should Be!
Speaker(s)	Brad Clark
Company Name(s)	Rigging Dojo
Track / Format	Programming
Overview	MotionBuilder, love it or hate it, if you work with motion capture or animation it is in your pipeline. This is a short session jam-packed with Brads best hacks to save you days of work per motion edit. In this session, you will learn to love it more or hate it less with hacks like effortless animation mixing, motion mirroring, quick squash and stretch, faster foot rigs, must-have scripts and efficient custom rig re-use. Techniques learned in this session, while focused on MotionBuilder, can be applied to the HIK rig in Maya as well. #animtip #rigtip #Maya3d #MotionBuilder #