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5 Bone Fully Rigged Character (Forums : 3D Modeling & Animating : 5 Bone Fully Rigged Character) Locked
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Feb 20 2014 Anchor

Hey I've written a short article on how I'm doing a"Fully!" Rigged Humanoid Character with arms,legs,elbows,knees containing only 5 important skeletal joints (my rig has six) and some clever skinning. The rig is made for our yet-to-be-named yet-to-be-dated "Game2" at Playdead - who kindly granted me permission to share it as I like, since it contains no info on our current production.

I thought the idea and philosophy behind the rig and the creation of it might interest some. It's field of usage could be either low-end hardware or real-time crowd rendering. Rigging-wise it is however excessively fun to just philosophize and ponder about this sort of hyper optimization.

Here is a link to the article on my site : Starfish Rig online article
And here is a link to the article as PDF : Starfish Rig as PDF

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Feb 21 2014 Anchor

Really nice work on explaining your process and the reasons behind it.
I especially like how you took care to show "problem areas like the knees" and ways to handle it.
Great work and a nice tutorial :) thankyou.

--

Stress is when you wake up screaming & you realize you haven't fallen asleep yet.
Don't force it, get a larger hammer.
I tried to daydream, but my mind kept wandering

casf01
casf01 Rigger / tech artist
Feb 22 2014 Anchor

This rig have a huge draw back depending on the engine you use.... You got to export positions tracks,

Feb 22 2014 Anchor

casf01 wrote: This rig have a huge draw back depending on the engine you use.... You got to export positions tracks,


Interesting. Please elaborate. Thais

Edit:
Oh i see what you mean. We are doing that anyway, and ill explain why when im not on my phone. Hehehe. And calling it a HUGE drawback is quite an exageration. :D

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Edit:
ok back on my spot at the office. :D

We live in an age where the engines does indeed have the ability to cope with having 6 simultaneously animated attributes at the same time. Heck often scale is included, especially Nintendo are very fond of using scale to fake wobblyness. I don't know if they sacrifice translation for that though. Whatever

Being an animated, trained classically - I have a huge urge to be free. I don't want to be pinned down by some rig with constraints. In movie production riggers often lock down things that they don't want the animator to touch, well knowing that if they left those attributes unlocked the team of animators would split the rigs like termites.
I often ask the riggers to either leave every attribute open, or unlock them if they have previously been locked. The reason is that without the ability to translate bones out of their original position it is near impossible to make things look real. Here is another one of my philosophies - maybe I should make a short article about that at some point.

Things shouldn't BE real - they have to LOOK real.

So maybe it is impossible for bones to leave their little sockets on parent joints in reality - but there are so many factors to take into account when animating a person running. Cloth, skin, fat, momentum, velocity, energy, intention, aspiration - some of these things that does not really exist physically. We, the animators, have come to a conclusion (until another conclusion is discovered) where having free attributes and for movies non confined blendshapes or no blendshapes at all gives us the tools to actually "enchant" the otherwise dead corpses we animate with things that is hard to define. Such as some of the above mentioned.

I hope you understand. It is hard to explain. :D

Edited by: andreasng

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