Greetings
I’ve been getting lumped with ever increasingly complex tasks/requests, but have still not received any formal training. (except for one of Paul’s awesome scripting classes, which pretty effectively demonstrated how out of touch with best practices I am)
Up until now, all our use of 3ds has been highly engineering related with lots of complex maths, but very simple rigs/scenes.
The next bit of work however, involves an actual character. After spending a few days setting up the hierarchy of parts, adding helpers, test sliders, and IK solvers I thought I was doing really well. Each part in isolation seemed quite sensible. Then I tried to actually move/animate the thing in a test scene, and I ended up fighting poor inheritance decisions, and a clear clash between FK and IK. (which I completely ignored, and hoped would just work) It took me hours to produce a few seconds of crappy motion.
I’m thinking this is pretty bread n butter stuff for most of you. I.E. I’m struggling with:
- How to rig this character model
- How to set and manage poses, and transition between them (Pose Saver?)
- How to to animate walk/run cycles, and integrate them with poses
I’d love to sit down in person with somebody to get pointed in the right direction, otherwise online help could work. I’m sure I can find some budget for this as well.
I’ll be in Vegas till then end of the month if anyone (or someone you can recommender) happens to be here. Near Toronto for a few days at the beginning of September, then back to Melbourne Australia.
Any takers, or general advice?
Cheers
Mikie
i want to say three main things about the character rigging:
good rigger is who knows everything about max controllers
manual rigger against script-rigger is like turtle against Ferrari
every rig master (including me :)) shows in his ‘master class tutorials’ only things that obsolescent to be used by himself
or use CAT…why re-invent the wheel…at least you’ll get a walk cycle…hmm…so paul only teaches obsoltete stuff to protect his livelihood? interesting…I must admit he is a bot cagey about releasing some of the more useful scripts used in his classess…
CAT? give me a break! it’s too buggy and cannot be used in production.
master classes? well… ik/fk blended skeleton? reverse foot? yep… 10 years ago it probably was a hit.
I beg to differ, master riggers know how to work around bugs, and build great tools for there users.
We’re all in that same boat, I’ve been working since 2001, and only last year started using maya for the first time (max veteran since DOS), and using python. You just have to really question your processes heavily i find, and ask yourself the why and how’s. What does the rig need to do? What are the types of motion it needs to accomplish?, does it need to be adaptable and sharable?
Also look at reels and rigs currently out there to get a general sense of the systems people are making – it’ll help guide you. Rigs today generally have a global control, broad sub-controls e.g hips, chest and ‘tweak’ controls to finesse the silhouette of the rig. Many rigs have the notion of ‘pinning’ or locking controls in a coordinate space – eg. the heads rotation in world space. Keyable pivots are yet another transform manipulation method but can get tricky.
So think of global, broad and finite in-terms of hierarchies or layers of controls. It’s the same for animation – layout (global), blocking/keys/stepped(broad), break-downs/curve adjustment(finite).
If from your perspective your building systems that will essentially drive an external ‘physical’ rig; that physical rig would probably give you direction on how you should build your virtual one – internalize those needs into a digital rig and then give it the usability that allows it to be animated easily.
how much can you read in ‘master classes’ about terminators? do you know how to make ik/fk stretching be switched smoothly? how to defeat the swivel angle flip effect when you switch fk to ik? anybody knows? ready to share the answers?
that’s smart. it will save you time and money.
CAT? give me a break! it’s too buggy and cannot be used in production.
its true CAT is too buggy, but if the character only used in 1-5 short shot i think its okay. but not recommended when its used in long production. its suicide if you use CAT in animation tv series production imho
Thanks guys, the guidance is greatly appreciated!
One of the main reasons I can’t consider biped or CAT is because the animation is being used to drive a 4.5m tall, 1800kg marionette in the real world. I need to get smooth position, speed, and acceleration vs time data. Whenever I’ve tried to use the built in tools, very ugly things can happen to acceleration vs time, especially at the extremes of a join angle.
So in making my own, I can be sure there are no motion surprises (all the resultant data looks fine, and my tensions solvers work a treat) but actually using the thing makes me want to cry because my infantile rigging technique is solely based on a few online tutorials, and as Dennis is saying, the devil is always in the detail, which seldom gets explained in tutorials. There is a lot of ‘how’ but very little ‘why’.
For example, my IK hand targets are children of my main torso helper object (the figure is hanging from a movable torso). This is handy when I want to move all of him at once, but really annoying when trying to move the torso and hands independently. I’m assuming they shouldn’t be in a hierarchy, but use another object when I want to move both at once. I also couldn’t figure out how to orient his hands without his arm disintegrating, so am using the most annoying, awkward, look at constraint and up-node set up.
I mean, it took me almost 4 hours to do 20 seconds worth of animation. I’m not the greatest animator, and admittedly some of the was due to learning curve, and re-working some of my rig. But I need to be churning out stuff for this guy for the next 18 months. So any improvement will have a massive positive knock on effect.
Mikie
that’s actually easy and not a big secret. Just use Link_Constraint. At any moment you can change a link target from torso to world (or character root) there and back.
you’ve asked for advice. i have to say that a good rigger has to know the basic of animation. also my experience says that only a good x-animators can design a really good character rig.
I would agree with this completely. I animated for many years, much of it was with my own rigs so I quickly learned what I was doing wrong.
I for one would not be here now if it wasn’t for people like Paul and Bobo sharing their tricks.
its a strange thing to contemplate life as an animator and then as a TD . I feel an irony as i am aware of my technical focus, as I began my career wholly artistically. yet I am responsible for this as I became more interested in solving bottlenecks of animation. So I drove myself down this path. rigging is a tough gig, I tend to beat myself up if I make mistakes (which is often) but I still feel you are in a good place if you are making good tools from an animator’s perspective.
i don’t understand this problem. how ik or fk arm can disintegrate?
mainly by linking thinks incorrectly, or inheriting things one shouldn’t. I.e. you move a helper and all of a sudden all the bits of the arm start separating
most of your issues can be solved by using helper objects linked appropriately together with max list controllers. Layer them up, as many as you like…they then operate independently of one another…
how much can you read in ‘master classes’ about terminators? do you know how to make ik/fk stretching be switched smoothly? how to defeat the swivel angle flip effect when you switch fk to ik? anybody knows? ready to share the answers?
yeah use quaternion rotations…ik/fk stretching ? you mean switching or…? that’s no prob. simple scripting…paul had tutorial on that…terminators? got a tute on that one that’s years old
Thanks again. I’m working though some more logical and flexible linking of helpers now, and will try another test scene tomorrow to see if it works any better.
From my perspective, the actual process of scripting, linking and list controller management isn’t the problem. It’s the ‘why’, and organizational choices. The only way I am finding out the ‘why’ is by trail and error, and it seems like re-inventing the wheel somehow. I guess this is the process all of you have gone through in developing your skills and riggers, animators and TDs.
I guess some of the added pressure is managing my employers expectation. I think they are assuming that because I’m writing heaps of maxcript and c# to move data back and forth between our control system and 3ds Max, I can also deal with characters, and animate them. Because, well, “that’s what 3ds Max, is designed to do”. I’m not sure they appreciate how time consuming the task can be. Not that I can really expect them to, as I’m not sure how time consuming the task will be…
I’ve never actually seen how a character is animated. How long it takes. How revisions, and poses are managed.