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Cult of Rig : Season 00 Day 009 Applying Math to Fix Components

The rig as you see it by the end of this session, plus a little bit of crud cleaned out, is now available at
http://www.cultofrig.com/resources/re…
If you’ve fallen behind but still want to nodel with me, now you can catch up. Or just take it apart 🙂

Season 00 Day009 Stream – Applying Math to Fix Components

http://www.cultofrig.com/2017/06/18/pilot-season-day-8-applied-math/
“Building upon the theory established the previous day we can now flatten the rig hierarchy some more to extract the pedals from their FK only position, and complete the transform for the staff to inherit rotation.”

Rigging Dojo Notes

  • Why not make everything flat? While keeping the controls not in a deep hiearchy helps with flexablity but making a flat “component” limits the amount of control you get out of the component, in Maya you can always get worldspace from a node so making everything worldspace/flat you loose any local data you get from a hierarchy.
  • Fix the rig:
    • Graph from the output or forward from the input of the component to start walking the graph and troubleshoot the rig.
    • Matrix multiply pedals_M_staff_ctrl  by pedals_M_staff_ctrl_srtBuffer (order matters)
      • decompose the matrix and  and drive the rotation of the staves_srt to fix the current rig bug.
  • Fix IK control

  • To get the IK FK blend, need to make sure both are in the same space
  • Here Raf blasts away chunks of the rig instead of trying to fix or figure out what they were doing.
  • He explores getting the pedals_M_ikPedals_projectedAngle_fnode hooked up to the same space as the FK driver.
  • There is some discussion as he rehooks up the nodes so it is a good point to watch from here
  • Tips: expression vs. nodes? try both and see what is faster in your rig but stay away from Python Nodes so they don’t play well with parallel.

Pedal settings of the IK FK attribute

  • If you name the attribute FK IK switch, then that is the order it should blend in, pay attention to those details.
  • *Q: do you alias attributes? No Raf hates them and it complicates things later on, don’t bother.
  • Some left over logic nodes from past videos Raf hooked the nodes back up to the animBlendNodeAdditive  weights to hook it back up like before.

Question: What about rigging like this with so many nodes vs. constraints etc, does it become complicated, but the point of this is to learn to rig with CLEAR input and Output of each component. It is easier to refactor for complex rigging.
Maya needs compound nodes (if they do) this style of rigging will scale better as it gets more complex (parallel processing for Maya)

Request: Node editor: let us grab a connection line and drag duplicate to another node for connection instead of having to click on the source node and drag the connections.

Change space of the pedals and update the rig

Fix a pedal offset bug

RDNotes:At this point in the video, Raf has to explore and troubleshoot the graph- he knows what he is doing and build the graph and still hits a problem. This is how rigging goes, it isn’t a perfect straight path to a working rig. This is what the job is, and worth watching how it works through how to fix the problem.

….to be continued in the next stream

 

 

Get involved:

Scene used to display the functions is available at:
http://www.cultofrig.com/resources/re…
Maya 2016 and up.

Follow me on twitter for announcements and news
https://twitter.com/ThE_JacO

Check out the calendar for up-to-date information and times
http://cultofrig.com/streamcalendar

Follow the Streams live on Twitch
https://www.twitch.tv/cultofrig/

And keep up to date with news on the website
http://www.cultofrig.com

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Blog Post

Cult of Rig : Season 00 Day 008 Math Crash Course

Season 00 Day 008 Stream – Math Crash Course – Trigonometry and Matrix Mult

Trig is the study and solution of triangles…or all angles

Starting with Trigonometry as it is a basic and good place to start vs. starting with linear algebra that creates lots of extra wasted calculations.

“You hear me mention custom nodes…doesn’t mean you don’t have to use custom nodes unless you need performance, but the math part is important for foundations”

Trigonometry

  • Right triangle is where we start (triangle with 90 degree corner)
    • degree vs. radian
      • Also the “Why” of when unitConversion nodes show up as you connect a translate value to rotation.
      • unitConversion nodes are normal maya nodes with some basic math (conversion factors) and change the type of the connection at the output (
    • Scene used to display the functions is available at:
      http://www.cultofrig.com/resources/re…
      Maya 2016 and up.
  • Back to radians
    • Radius of the circle  R=1   means 1/2 is PI 3.14  so full raius is 2 PI R
    • when you see radians the start of the circle is 0, end is 2 PI, half circle is 1/2 PI
  • Degrees
    • Circle is broken in to 360 values , 0, 90, 180, 270, 360
  • The relationship between the two is PI = 180   so if you need to convert them 3.14/180 to convert so when you look in the unitConversion node you see this math happening.

When you create triangles from a unit circle you always get hypontus of 1, simplifying calculations.

function of an angle (works in radians always works  between [-1,1]

  • Sin
  • Cos
  • Tangent ( can be infinite)

Each function has an inverse

  • arc sin
  • arc cos
  • arc Tangent

What do these do?

If we say the we get the Sin of the triangle leg, the Arc Sin will give us the Angle.

Given any axis, if you are rotating around Z for example , clockwise will be negative.  This isn’t great so flip the mesh around so that the rotation will be positive.

*Do follow along in Maya with the example scene and also create with Raf.

  • Build some primitives named
    • sine
    • cosine
  • We will rotate the HY transform node (from the example file) and on its rotation  to create an expression

skip from 30:00 to here to see 35.32 to see the expression work

in expression editor type sine.ty = sin(hy.rz) and click create

Rotate the hy node to see the SINE node translate up and down. Because the connection creates a unitConversion by default you can change the value in the unitConversion node to 1 to allow it to pass through to the SIN() in the expression with no rad/deg convert.

Next we create the cosine transform expression  cosine.tx = cos(hy.rz) so we now have our nodes translating up and down and left and right as we rotate the HY node.

Behind the scenes in Maya when you take  a “vector” and rotate it with Matrix Math.

If we connect the  translate X from cosine and translate Y from sine to a new transform you can see that the new Transform (say a new sphere) you will get the same action as if a parent constraint on the new sphere following the HY node.

The combination of the Sin and Cos create a translation the spears to be a rotation.

Soh Cah Toa

For any giving angle there are two sides, (legs) adjacent, opposite and hypotenuse

S(?) = 0/h  C(?)=a/h  T(?)=o/a

Law of Sin and Law of Cosin 55:30

a/sinA = b/sinB = c/sinC

Law of cosines is the foundation for IK solvers like the 2 bone solver

“I mention all of this because when ever you are using Matrices because this is what you are doing under the hood a lot”

Matrix:

Linear field of numbers with sides

Vector for example is a single column Matrix.

Raf gets in two a few topic tangents and you are best watching it as it is hard to note what he was talking about with all the drawing and graphics.

What happens when the Matrix is not normal? 1:15

QA:

Why is this important?

 

 

Get involved:

Scene used to display the functions is available at:
http://www.cultofrig.com/resources/re…
Maya 2016 and up.

Follow me on twitter for announcements and news
https://twitter.com/ThE_JacO

Check out the calendar for up-to-date information and times
http://cultofrig.com/streamcalendar

Follow the Streams live on Twitch
https://www.twitch.tv/cultofrig/

And keep up to date with news on the website
http://www.cultofrig.com

Categories
Blog Post rigtip

Cult of Rig : Season 00 Day 06 – Theory and Applied vectors, IK pedals

Season 00 Day 6 – Theory and Applied vectors, IK pedals

 

“More on vectors while we actually show some application, and eventually make it to hooking up the pedals’ geo to the IK pedals control in the niche of time”

“Day 6, crash course in vector math, sprinkle of matrix math, and finally, applying in Maya. IK pedals connected to the geometry in the niche of time.”

continuing from last video cult-rig-season-00-day-005-vectors

Quick catch up:

  • Shout out to animBlendNodeAdditiveRotation for angle connections without unitConvert nodes.
  • Pythagorean theorem reminder for dealing with vector length
  • |V| or ||V|| is how you might see will be an absolute length of a vector, if you read about vectors in math books
  • a unit vector is the vector compressed in to a 0 to 1 range
    if you want to scale it, normalize it first then * by value to scale it up to be longer.

How to do this with nodes: Vector scale and playing with vector math.

  • create a control transform group “pedal_ik_ctrl”
  • Add a cone polygon primitive
  • Connect the ik control to drive the cone
    • create the node vectorProduct
    • connect ik translate to node input and go output to the cone translate.
    • set the vectorProduct attribute normalize output this crates a “follow” that is limited to a range of 1 and set to “no operation” because we only want the value normalized.

How do we create the Math with only nodes?

  • interesting tip that comes up later: If you have two vectors and normalize them then do dotProduct you get the angle between them
  • Create a spherical constraint with just vector math(13:29)
    • ik ctrl node translate – vector Product-translate of target
    • To control the length is multiply the vectorProduct by a value with a multiplydivide node before the target translate.
    • If you want to lock this sphere to a single plane you need to set the axis in the mitiplyDivde node to zero.

Need to control this effect or build on.

  • dotProduct
    • ||a|| *||b||* cos  – if you have two normalized vectors multiplied by COS gives you an angle.
    • If your vectors are aligned (angle zero) the COS of that angle is going to be 1
      • ||b|| * COS  normalized gives you the magnitude(length) of the vector
  • So with out a “length node” in Maya we can use the vectorProduct node
    • pedal_ik_ctrl.translate out to vectorProduct 1 node (normalizing the value no operation) -out to vectorProduct 2nd node input 1
    • pedal_ik_ctrl.translate out to vectorProduct 2 node input 2 (with no normalizing set to dotProduct)
  • We get the result of the length of the vector
  • Condition node (if length of first vector in to “first term” ) is greater than 3 (then we want the reScaled vector from multiplyDivde node “second term” )
    multiplyDivide.output – Color if true.
    otherwise if the length is less than, use the pedal_ik_ctrl translate.
    Then take condition.out to the cone.translate.
  • This creates an “IK” like behavior by creating a limited range

RIGGING : Back to rigging the bike pedals

Raf now uses what he just worked through with the vectors to create the rigging. And updates the names of the nodes.

  • pedals_M_pedal_IK_ctrl_srtBuffer
    • pedals_M_pedal_IK_ctrl
  • pedals_M_pedal_IK_ctrl. translate->vectorProduct (no operation) – multipleyDivide

 

We want to have our pedals_M_pedal_ik_ctrl_srtBuffer end up in the same space as the the pedal_Mstaff_ctrl_srtBuffer + an offset

  1. parent pedals_M_pedal_IK_ctrl_srtBuffer under pedals_M_cmpnt-control
  2. world2Pedals_offset_srt->wheel_M_main_ctrl_wMtx_output_fNode2 -> pedals_M_pedal_IK_ctrl_srtBuffer
  3. create a new node staff2pedals_offset_srt that is a child of pedals_M_cmpnt- input- world2pedals_offset_srt (rename name to world2staff_offset_srt )
  4. staff2pedals_offset_srt world matrix out- to new decomposeMatrix node wheel_M_main_ctrl_wMtx_output_fNode3- srt out to pedals_M_pedal_IK_ctrl_srtBuffer

Now the IK control starts in the same place as the FK

Raf does something interesting here to drive the control points on the shape for the pedal inverse of the transform to create a visual link 

At this point Raf also digs in to Matrix math (1:00hr) to setup the information needed to create context to the nodes and rigging that he needs to do to make the IK buffer work in the rig.

*Maya uses row matrices, reading top to bottom across the matrix

1,0,0,0 x
0,1,0,0 y
0,0,1,0 z
0,0,0,1 (w) displacement from world 0,0,0

Continue the rig

  • world2staff_offset_srt
  • pedals_M_peal_IK_ctrl

New node time ( multiplyMatrix )

Take the inverse matrix from world2staff_offset_srt ->multMatrix.Matrix In[2]

and pedals_M_peal_IK_ctrl.worldMatrix to ->multMatrix.Matrix In[1]

Now decompose the multMatrix output  and drive a sphere for visualize the output of the offset we now need in order to drive our pedals.

delete it and create a cone.

parent the code under the world2staff_offset_srt for visualization of the pivot.

  • multMatrix-decompose->and attach it to the translate/rotate to check that your offset goes to the pedal location.

But we need rotations, not translate

  • create vectorProduct and set it to no operation
  • Dot product can give you both projection and angle of the vector.
  • New node (angle between)
    • multMatrix-decompose-Y and Z in to the angle between vector Y.Z and then angle.euler out to the cone to show rotation. of only Y and Z, keeping X from solving and creating a flat plane of rotation
    • To invert the value push the Euler out to animBlendnodeAdditiveRotation and – the weight so you can get the rotation angle in the direction you need.
    •  To do the final rig hook up between the IK and FK  using the existing animBlendnodeAdditiveRotation  node, take and pedals_M_staff_Ctrl (our fk rig) .Rotate  into  animBlendnodeAdditiveRotation.inputb
    • then animBlendnodeAdditiveRotation.Output – to Deform-pedals_M_pole_srt
  • Now the weight value on the animBlend node will mix between the IK or FK rig system.

 

What does this give us?

  1. A rig that doesn’t depend on hierarchy
  2. no relationships with layers of constraints because the rigging is managed with pure math and in the DG not in the hiearchy.
  3. A deeper understanding of what Maya is managing behind the scenes when you are doing constraints and parents etc in the DAG.

 

 

Get involved:
Follow Raf on twitter for announcements and news
https://twitter.com/ThE_JacO
Follow the Streams live on Twitch
https://www.twitch.tv/cultofrig/
Subscribe and watch past broadcasts
Cult of Rig -YouTube
And keep up to date with news on the website
http://www.cultofrig.com

 

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Blog Post Rigging Dojo AIR rigtip video

Artist in Residence Video on updated descriptions and video notes

We have been continuing to update the video on demand AIR (Artist In residence) interview video with descriptions and time marked video notes.

Rigging Dojo Artist in Residence ( A.I.R ) “A la Carte” Replay Store from Rigging Dojo on Vimeo.

Title     Breathing Life into Zombies

Date    July 30, 2014

Length    1:25:58

Presenter    Sterling Reames

Bio    Principal Animator at Bit Fry Game Studios.  Also worked as the Senior Animator at Proletariat animating the living, the dead and the living dead in World Zombination.

Topic(s)    Behind the scene view of rigging World Zombination characters

Description    Discusses what it took to get the characters rigged and animated for the game + free World Zombination character rigs.

Brief Outline         2:36 – Day-to-Day Work

5:56 – Referencing and Changing Rig

8:55 – Rendering Process

20:33 – Creating the Look and Movement

  • Maps
  • How to Add to Rig System
  • Weights
  • Rigging Experiments
  • Lots of Controls

1:03:31 – Other Tools Needed?

1:15:44 – What’s Next?

 

Title     Simple Solutions To Complex Problems

Date    August 21, 2014

Length    1:42:18

Presenter    James Direen

Bio    Senior Rigging Artist at Reel FX Creative Studios.  Recent works include Rock Dog, The Book Of Life, Free Birds and Despicable Me: Minion Mayhem 3D.

Topic(s)    How to find a balance to overthinking a solution

Description    Shows how the three steps to working through a problem were used for The Book of Life characters.

Brief Outline         2:43 – Overview

7:10 – Analyzing the Issue

8:40 – Eyelids Rig Example

21:08 – Designing the Solution

27:11 – Arm Rig Example

47:19 – Script Node for IK/FK System

52:45 – Working Through Production

54:40 – Refactoring and Reusability Concepts

1:00:59 – Radial Angle Driver Example

1:22:11 – Q & A

 

Title     Day of the Dead Treats

Date    October 31, 2014

Length    1:27:17

Presenter    Josh Carey

Bio    Co-founder of Rigging Dojo and Head of Rigging at Reel FX Creative Studios.  Recent work includes Rock Dog, The Book of Life and Free Birds.

Topic(s)    Techniques used for The Book of Life characters

Description    Discusses how custom plug-ins and surface projections were used for the characters in The Book of Life as well as other rig examples

Brief Outline         1:21 – Sausage Lips

24:11 – Chuy Controls

38:52 – Commercial Project

49:18 – Looney Tunes Smears

51:32 – Happy Rig

58:58 – Ribbon Example

1:01:10 – Q&A

 

Title     First Steps

Date    December 3, 2014

Length    1:35:17

Presenter    Evan Cox

Bio    Associate Technical Animator with Deep Silver Volition.  2013 graduate from Michigan State University with a BA in Game Design and Development.  Rigging Dojo alumni.

Topic(s)    Getting your foot in the industry door

Description    Evan explains his process for learning his craft then applying it to get a job in the game industry

Brief Outline         8:25 – Why Is This Relevant?

10:35 – Educational Aspect

30:31 – Scripting Projects

  • Automated Facial Rigging System
  • Google Image Search

49:19 – Look to Those Above You

54:39 – Transitioning to a Work Environment

1:02:10 – Glad I Did – Wish I Had

1:10:18 – Q&A

 

Title     Matt’s TD Toolkit

Date    December 12, 2014

Length    50:22

Presenter    Matthew Kapfhammer

Bio    Pipeline Architect with Neoglyphic Entertainment.  Also worked as Motion Capture Pipeline Developer at Weta Digital.  Recent work includes Furious 7, the Hobbit trilogy, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Man of Steel and the Avengers.

Topic(s)    Using third-party tools and programming concepts for writing code

Description    An overview of the various areas of a pipeline and the different tools needed to make the workflow process easier

Brief Outline         2:18 – General Work Concepts

13:00 – Software Type Tools

22:34 – Making Sure Code Works

33:50 – Versions and Source Control

36:59 – Resources and Further Reading

38:48 – Q&A

Title     Triangle Vision for Problem Solving

Date    February 26, 2015

Length    1:25:05

Presenter    Robbert-Jan Brems

Bio    Co-creator of Xoliul Shader and Technical Artist at Eidos-Montreal.  Recent work includes the stealth video game Thief.

Topic(s)    How to divide and conquer any problem you want to solve

Description    Methodology for breaking down problems into different components to find new solutions

Brief Outline         5:36 – Building Blocks

16:51 – The Process

25:52 – Learn Something New Every Day Tool Example

40:35 – Feedback Tool Example

50:51 – Q & A

 

Title     Well-Behaved QT UIs in Maya

Date    April 8, 2015

Length    1:12:11

Presenter    John Hood

Bio    Pipeline Supervisor for Sony Pictures Imageworks.  Recent work includes Pixels, Hotel Transylvania and Edge of Tomorrow.   Currently working on The Angry Birds Movie.

Topic(s)    Tips for creating UIs with QT and PySide

Description    Covers concepts for creating UIs in Maya that behave correctly

Brief Outline         2:39 – Getting Started

8:54 – Core Class Structure

25:50 – The Business End of Things

56:31 – Why QStandardItemModel

 

Title     Fast Rigs

Date    July 29, 2015

Length    2:00:24

Presenter    Raffaele Fragapane

Bio    Rigging Supervisor for the film VFX division of Animal Logic.  Recent work includes Walking with Dinosaurs 3D.

Topic(s)    Tips for resolving performance related issues

Description    Understanding performance fundamentals in order to evaluate and improve how fast a rig is processed

Brief Outline         2:30 – Graph Theory

  • Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG)
  • Dependency Graph
  • Push – Pull – Hybrid

50:17 – How Threading Works

1:13:09 – Running Parallel Evaluation

1:30:22 – Q & A

 

Title     Python for Production Or – How Not to Screw Everyone

Date    September 2, 2015

Length    1:22:21

Presenter    John Hood

Bio    Pipeline Supervisor for Sony Pictures Imageworks.  Recent work includes Pixels, Hotel Transylvania and Edge of Tomorrow.   Currently working on The Angry Birds Movie.

Topic(s)    Tips and tricks for creating Python scripts for production

Description    Introductory tutorial on ways to organize scripts for maximum amount of reuse and extensibility

Brief Outline         3:43 – What It’s Not

8:20 – Marriage of Programming and Down and Dirty Coding

10:23 – Key Concept – Model/View Architecture

  • Library
  • UI – Entry Points
  • Testing

28:54 – Example

 

Title     Getting Organized and Keeping It Simple

Date    October

Length    1:31:47

Presenter    Jeff Brodsky

Bio    Character Technical Director at Disney Feature Animation.  Recent works include Big Hero 6, Epic, Ice Age: Continental Drift and Rio.

Topic(s)    Ways to simplify and organize a rig

Description    Discusses Rigging Dojo’s short film rigging course, Big Hero 6 spine rigging and organizing a rig

Brief Outline         0:57 – Rigging for Cartoon Production Class

6:25 – Using GitHub for Revisions

11:53 – Character Framework

38:04 – Organizing the Rig

47:32 – dRig System

54:35 – New Big Hero Spine Rig

1:02:34 – What to Show on Demo Reels

1:10:57 – Q&A

 

Title     UX for Rigs and Tools

Date    June

Length    45:18

Presenter    Chad Moore

Bio    A veteran technical artist, animator, manager and director specializing in character animation for games and game cinematics.  Co-founder of Rigging Dojo and Senior Technical Project Manager at Mad*Pow.

Topic(s)

Description

Brief Outline         2:50 – UX Overview

7:43 – Examples

  • Turbine Toolbar
  • Tactic
  • Env Switcher

23:27 – How to Get Started

23:50 – Recommended Reading

24:51 – Deciding UX Changes for a Rig

33:27 – Axure Mockup

39:11 – Let’s Build Something!

Title     Rig Feedback and Deformation Review

Date    Unknown

Length    1:11:56

Presenter    Brad Clark

Bio    Co-founder of RiggingDojo.com, character art and technology consultant working with next generation rigging and animation software projects and technical software support for Motus Digital.

Topic(s)        Feedback and deformation review of student rig created by Aaron

        Carlisle

Description    Covers joint placement and deformation setup and provides tips and advice on skinning and deformations

Brief Outline         1:51 – Model and Joint Issues

41:53 – Deformation Corrections

56:39 – Final Thoughts

Categories
Blog Post Course Announcement Founders Portfolio news rigtip tutorial update video

Behind the scenes of our Character Rigging 101 course

During our last run of our Rigging 101 course, we did a week by week post about what we were working on with our students.
It is our best way to show and share with you what makes our course stand out and benifit our students that, over and over again, have told us they have been unable to find in any other learning opportunity.
So enjoy this week by week breakdown of what our Character Rigging 101 and we hope to train with you soon
Josh, Brad and Chad
Rigging Dojo

Week 1 behind the scenes:

Week one is deceptively simple, but it is a test of lots of areas all at once. Can you read and follow directions and communicate well, can you learn to evaluate and prep a model for rigging so it doesn’t cause issues later including looking over topology and starting pose. Get some tools and scripts installed like the mGear rig and get it working or did you give up, get stuck and loose focus.
Online classes are harder in some ways but because we are result focused, working remotely we get an incredible view at how good an employee a student would be, how do they approach asking for help and how resourceful are they in trying to solve their own issues, and lastly, how well do the share and help their classmates with what they figured out?

http://www.miquel-campos.com/…/mGear

mGear Rigging Framework for Autodesk Maya. Now available!Download: https://gumroad.com/l/mgear

Week 2 behind the scenes:

Focus on really seeing the reference and not just the icon of what you think the anatomy looks like leads to better skeletons, deformations and natural movement once animation starts.
We also hit the tech side of understanding the Maya Joint and skeleton creation process. How to place them, controlling orients and relating this back to deformation quality and rig stability.
Week 2 is a hard week and pushes the students to balance technical with artistic skills.
It is often an undo week, where many students undo or unlearn things they thought they understood and we start the removal of bad habits created from other training sources.

Week 3 behind the scenes:

Another week and we are now digging in to skinning and deformation, connecting the work from last week on Joint Placement to how it effects our skin weights. We show them how to make using the existing skinning tools work best and explore NGSkinTools to have a foundation to build on later with helper joints, corrective shapes and twist or bendy joint layers…it all has to start with a good base deformation foundation.
Students also start looking at the UI/UX part of rigging and work on understanding how to build controls for animators and why they are built a certain way so they can start laying out controls for their final skeleton.

Week 4 behind the scenes:

Last week students dug in to learning about character UI and control building, this week started off with a look underneath all the connections and tools and math needed to start driving those controls.
Understanding what Nodes are, connections and the tools to work with them and a look at the 3d math like Matrix and Vectors that helps understand what is happening when you parent or constrain or simply move something around in the viewport. Then they explore constraints and build a foundation to start rigging something in this case -tentacles like Doctor Octopus from Spider man.

 Math links for 3d artists

Collecting our links over the past year for all the good math for artists we have found. Here they are in a nice, easy to find place for everyone.

Week 5 behind the scenes:

We dive back into deformations this week with a deeper look at advanced workflows and more details on using the Maya skin tools and NGSkinTools. Working smarter not harder with skinning and knowing the tools and how control them for the desired result is key to good workflow.
Then taking the rigging learning from last week it was now time to apply it to setting up helper joints like twist extractors and also understanding their limitations.

Week 6 behind the scenes: Time to rig a character!

There isn’t a perfect rig for every situation
Advanced rigging doesn’t mean complex and fragile
The basic fundamentals of rigging, manipulating pivot points and hierarchical relationships through connections of varying types is what it all comes down to. (AKA zero it, group it, connect it, tweak it, constrain it) whatever you do in your rig, never forget it has to get from pose A to pose B for the animator without exploding
A complex rig, full of layers of controls, at the core, is still just pivots and relationships.
Students this week get to learn about and start exploring rigging the character and seeing similarities between parts of the body like spine and fingers or legs and arms. We look at space switching and start digging in to understanding how to hook up all the controls, twists systems and rig the character to be able to be animated.

Want to work on a rig also? We have our free 101 quadruped rigging series that our good friend from Rigging 101 (the site) Javier “Goosh” let us host and share with you all.


Quadruped Friendly Rigging – Rigging

 

Week 7 behind the scenes: Advanced deformation cleanup:

Rigging is underway and now we look back to deformations and how to improve and fine tune them.
Without a full muscle system (or even with one http://zivadynamics.com/ ) it is still common practice to use blendShapes with some sort of pose space driver to fix and adjust the mesh when skinning and helpers can’t do any better.
There are nice new tools in 2017 of Maya that allow for doing these without external tools and hacks, though there are some limits to how complex the shape system is some TDs have found, it is still a great starting point to keep everything self contained in Maya.

http://www.riggingdojo.com/…/…/maya-2016-5-2017-invertshape/

Morgan shared a tip on how to invert a shape when you want to make a corrective blendshape and have it work on a skinned mesh, right in Autodesk Maya

See more at ZIVADYNAMICS.COM

 Week 8 and our final week:

Last week was our final week for our Rigging 101 course and we finish up with students continue to work on their core rigs. While they do this, we move forward to talk about optimizations, basic face rig concept and a starting point and finish critiques and QA along with a discussion on how to continue learning from here. Students keep access to their course area and can continue to work on their projects, share updates with our private community of alumni and industry guests as well as get other perks for being part of our student and alumni community.

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*Note: First time students there is a 25$ registration fee.
*Rolling start dates based on application numbers and mentor availability.

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