Your CG problems solved
Jamie Godfrey, London
Pro artists tackle your queries
Unless you opt to use an automatic rigging tool, rig creation can be quite a time-consuming process, and from my experience, clients tend to prefer custom-built rigs rather than simply generic ones that don’t fully fulfil their needs.
Building the skeleton is straightforward, you just need to ensure the rotation orders and rotational axis are all corrected and set up to minimise gimbal lock. You can even use the Mirror Joints tool to copy one side of the skeleton to the other, or use the Projected Centering option, which will place joints in the middle of your model for you, saving time.
When it comes to creating the controls, which will drive the joints, these can be as simple or as creative as you want. Some like to use locators, but these are very generic and also not particularly user friendly. A NURBS circle is visibly much better and will work in most cases, but if every control looks the same your rig can be confusing to use, as the animator will struggle to know which control manipulates which area.
Finally, it’s time to make the controls drive the rig, and how you choose to do this, be it constraints, nodes or a combination of both, can again take time to go through and set up.
So, with all this to consider, technical artists are always on the lookout for ways to speed up the rig creation process. Obviously, having pre-made controls is a big bonus, you just import them into the scene, position them and they are ready to be used. With the skeleton you could use a similar approach, especially if the characters are close in shape. The only issue to be aware of here is if you move the joints you will have to update the rotational axis as they will become misaligned.
Even the underlying systems can be automated if you know a little MEL or Python, meaning repetitive tasks, like adding IK to FK blending, can be added in a few clicks.
So what happens when you’re not familiar with either of Maya’s scripting languages, and you need to do something like build the right arm when you just finished working on the left?
In this Q&A I will share a simple approach for quickly creating the skeleton and controls for the opposite limb, without the need to rebuild them.