DO I NEED TO LEARN PYTHON TO BE A GOOD CHARACTER RIGGER?
Glen Luther, Rotherham
When I first started to learn how to build rigs, I made a conscious decision to also dive in and learn to script too. The main reason for this was that I’d been given the task to rig 60 characters, all with similar structures, so it would be a relatively repetitive task. I saw scripting as a way for me to help speed up the process so I could skip the boring stuff and focus more on the fun side of rigging.
Since then, I’ve expanded my knowledge and moved over to Python, but because I’m self-taught there’s still a lot I don’t know or understand. The main thing is I know enough to be able to build tools for myself, as well as offer this service to my clients too.
I realise that rigging is complicated enough with all the nodes and systems involved, so do you really need to add to that by having the weight of learning to code piled on your shoulders too? I guess the answer would be no. I know a lot of people who quite happily build rigs in both the games and VFX industries and know very little when it comes to scripting. In fact, in larger companies there are teams of technical artists who focus on the scripts and tools side, leaving others to do the building.
That aside, would I recommend you learning it? Of course! From my experience I find that being able to write even a simple script can shave hours off your workload. Once you are good enough you can even create tools that will build whole systems for you with the click of a button.
Not only this, but being able to support your rigs with extra tools for exporting and animating makes you more valuable as an employee. For example, building a rig for your client is one thing, but also giving the animators tools to quickly switch between IK and FK, or mirror the animation, saves the whole team precious time.