IS THERE A WAY TO AVOID USING CONTROL OFFSET GROUPS IN MY RIG?

Joanne Wright, Bristol

With the next generation of consoles now upon us, the pressure is on for developers to give us richer worlds to explore, as well as more detailed and expressive characters. However, this does not just involve increasing the polygon count or using higher-resolution textures. It also has a huge impact on the rigs that are used to drive them.

When it comes to animation, to help achieve those higher quality levels, more joints and morph targets are needed. This means the underlying systems used to drive them become more and more complicated, while on the surface, the controls need to remain simple and user friendly so that the animator can still focus on their animation.

The issue with this is the more you build into a rig, the greater chance you have of the performance suffering. So, what can we do to lighten the load and make them more efficient?

Thankfully, with the release of Maya 2020, Autodesk gave technical artists a host of new rigging updates which, when used in the right way, can help to dramatically lighten the load on our rigs. And in some cases, the new tools can even eliminate the need for one particular type of node, one which has been an essential part of rigging for decades. So which nodes am I referring to? These are of course, the offset groups.

These groups may seem unimportant and to some, a little confusing, yet they play an important role in animation. Offset groups are used to offset the values that often end up on the controls as you create and position them. Storing the rotation values on the parent group, for

example, means your control can maintain its orientation while also having clean rotation values.

Having the controls at zero in the base pose makes for a cleaner rig, plus it can allow for an easier transfer of animation between characters. The problem is, having an offset group for each control can clog up the rig and this is where we can experience performance issues.

So how do we use the new Matrix nodes and widgets to eliminate the need for these? It’s actually quite simple, so continue reading to find out.

Offset groups have been used to keep controls clean for years, but is there a way we can avoid bloating our rigs with them?