Rigging is a highly effective technique used in the world of skeletal animation to bring CG characters to life. Whether you’re working with a 2D or 3D model, creating a character rig can be useful in order to define and manipulate the extent of the model’s movements and activities and to avoid re-drawing every pose. 

We’ll break down this magical tool into digestible tidbits so that you can transform your animation skills.

Tips for Character Rigging

No matter the complexity of your desired product, whether you’re making a few game scenes, or a longer animated film, going about rigging in the right way will make your life so much easier. Here are three helpful tricks to look out for to expedite the process:

Choose the Rig That Fits

Remember, rigs aren’t created to cover every possible action. Ask yourself what the character will be used for and make sure to concentrate your efforts there. For example, if the model will be used to create an emotive character in an animated film, you might choose to focus on a facial rig to ensure it achieves the range of expression that is required. 

On the other hand, if you’re designing a gaming character for a simple platform game, you may want to focus on a control rig that prioritizes multi-directional movement. Even a single rig can end up becoming quite complex, so make sure all your hard work targets your goal.

Deformation is Key

Utilizing deformations is a surefire way to streamline the animation process while achieving high-quality rigs. Deformers allow you to animate certain sections of the model in specific ways, such as bending or distortion, so that you can broaden the range of activity even further, creating the illusion of more organic movements. For example, while modeling limbs, you may want to create the look of bones and muscles moving underneath the skin. That’s where deformers like muscle rigs or helper joints come in. 

Deformers are also useful in successful facial rigging, in which you’ll need more individual movement of certain structures, like the cheeks for example, in which case you can use a bunch deformer, or the eyebrows using a wire deformer.

Work on a Legitimate Control Set Up

This step is especially imperative when you’re working in a studio and your job is to create the rig for another artist’s use. While you’ll likely use NURBS bends, the favorite of animators for control bends, be sure to name and color code each control box so that it’s easy and quick to read as someone unfamiliar with the set up. 

Also, be sure to limit and consolidate the number of controls to ensure they achieve the rig’s primary purpose with efficiency.

Tutorials

Although it should be emphasized that learning how to rig is accompanied by a steep learning curve, not to fear! Cubebrush has a ton of rich resources to assist you, such as tutorials that cover both the basics and complexities of character rigging.

Biped Rigging - Course Assets

This is a great tutorial for rigging beginners that provide both instructional videos and all the tools and scripts shown. It walks through all of the fundamentals throughout the entire pipeline, then moves on to advanced systems in order to provide you a solid foundation to begin creating complex rigs. The course includes 17 videos, covering subjects such as:

• Joint fundamentals and specifics
• Control creation
• Hand rigging
• Spine, head, and eye rigging
• Blendshape- and joint-based facial rigs

Lightwave 2015- Volume #11- Rigging for Beginners

This comprehensive rigging pack contains over 17 hours of content catered to 3D artists who are dedicated to learning all of the ins and outs of rigging. It will cover everything from the basic principles of rigging in Lightwave all the way through to the details of creating a high-level rig. It consists of over 100 chapters, that include the following topics and much more:

• Model position set up
• Bones creation
• Body weight map
• Various nulls
• Hierarchy tool
• Skelegons
• Importing and exporting files

Face Rig in Blender

This course reveals you a real workflow for creating a shape keys-based rig using ZBrush, with tricks and tips along the way. It first introduces you to the sculpting process and organization, then talks through the use of references while sculpting expressions in ZBrush. 

Those expressions will then be implemented within the face rig using deformations by bone-driven shape keys. Lastly, you’ll learn to create puppeteering systems and exporting to Unreal Engine. The content runs through topics such as:

• Basic bone rigging
• Importing shape  keys
• Wrinkle map preparation
• Visual controllers set up
• Dynamic wrinkle system
• Eyes shape keys and facial hair

News

In the ever-evolving world of technology, new software is constantly being developed to improve the workflows of CG artists across the industry. At the tail end of November of this year, Imbalance released Ragdoll Dynamics 3.0, an Autodesk Maya plug-in that provides a dynamic tool for animators looking to streamline the rigging process. 

This update that can make a huge difference for animators, transforming what was once a laborious and time-consuming process into a click-and-drag interface that works at speeds 100 times faster. 

The newest edition of Ragdoll Dynamics contains features such as live mode, an expanded high-res asset library, and physically based character posing.

If you’re curious about new advancements in the animation industry and have ideas that can make a change, you can also get involved with conferences and seminars, like The Future of Character Animation and Rigging workshop in the 2022 Blender Conference.  

Although Blender has been at the forefront of the industry for years, with its last update in 2009, and new technologies like Ragdoll Dynamics being developed on the daily, they decided it was time that Blender equipped itself for success in the upcoming years, and used the workshop to develop a new vision for an updated animation system. The team is searching for new developers, so sign up now!