Assignment 3: Personal Development Project
For this assignment, we were to allowed to freely chose an area we lack in and then present our development throughout this project in a blog.
Direction:
Although some areas such as digital sculpting and VFX were appealing to me I decided to go into a more challenging route where I lack the most and most likely to come up in later projects which is rigging. Besides working with a rigged model before (e.g. for my walk/run cycle) I don't have much experience at actually applying rigging to a model. Therefore, I want to take this opportunity to put all my focus to learn how to rig.
Artists:
I looked at an animator by the name of, 'Matthew Tovar' as he tends to upload animation rigs and actions on his social media which were inspirational to look at as it gives me an idea of where I wanted to be in years later on.
Another great artist, 'Stefan Ehrenhaus' who specialise in rigging. Although his technique is at a way higher level from where I am starting from but it was insightful to see how he approached it.
Some great tips for better rigging as a rigger in the animation industry such as 'less is more' in relation to controls etc.
Reading: https://www.pluralsight.com/blog/film-games/rigging-guideline-artist-whats-important-good-rig
I also looked a lot of rigging showreel to see their process and final presentation of their work which I aim to include in my work e.g. a short clip of them displaying how to use their controls etc.
What I hope to achieve at the end of this project:
I've just started rigging therefore my main aim is to least to have the fundamentals on how to apply rigging to a model from scratch.
Below is an example of the standard I want to achieve for now:
Process:
My goal at the end of this project is to be able to rig these models below:
Disclaimer: Those are Maya's models from the content browser. Since my main focus is rigging, using this content will help me move faster rather than wasting hours modelling objects that weren't my purpose for this project. From the content, I've chosen a human body, a cat, a fish and a pair of wings. I started off by choosing a biped model (HumanBody.ma), then advance to a quadruped animal (Cat.ma). Then I looked for other models that have different body aspects or ones that just look very interesting to rig. I ended up choosing a fish (BigFish.ma) and a pair of wings (Wings.ma).
What is rigging?
Rigging is basically creating a skeleton for your model so it can move and perform. If rigging is not applied the model will simply be a static object.
During my research, I found an informative page, 'Key 3D Rigging Terms to get you moving' from a site called, 'Pluralsight' where they introduce you to the terms in rigging e.g Ik and FK which was excellent to get me started.
Reading rigging terms:
I tested around with the rigging tools myself however I also found an extremely useful short introduction to rigging by 'Academic Phoenix Plus' which helped me understand the right way to use the tools:
The first model I will tackle is the human model.
The human body (male):
I didn't stay with just one tutorial for my rigging as I wanted to see how others differ from others. Also, most don't go through every area of the body. From all of the videos I've watched, I found tutorials by 3dEe and Academic Phoenix Plus personally helped me the most as it was very clean and instructive.
Human Reference: It was really self-explanatory that I should have a skeleton reference to really see where and how the joints are laid etc.
My first step was applying the joints. That area was quite straightforward. However, it was quite difficult placing the joints on fingers as it was hard to tell where each joint starts and ends due to the lack of definitions on the model. Then, it took me quite a while to fix the joint orientations as it very essential but I didn't really grasp the idea of how to fix it at the beginning. Thankfully later I got it arranged after understanding the concept better by watching more videos on this topic. From what I learnt is that x-axis faces towards the child/arrow direction of the joint and y-axis should stick up.
Working in X-ray joint mode:
Next, I moved on to the FK and IK Handles and control curves. The animator animates with the curves, not the joints so it's essential. That area was the most complicated for me as I still don't really understand what the right constraints to apply for particular areas which caused a lot of confusion and to research in alternative videos that explain it more precisely which certainly helped a lot.
For my model, I just did the basic overall controls. I also change the body colour to look less intimidating and also played around with the colour and shape of the curves to look more appealing and easier to handle.
Finish rig: Now I can still control it even with the joints hidden.
Following that is using weight painting and component editor to fix the sections that aren't supposed to tag along with the other controllers. I personally found using the component editor is the more efficient way as it's more precise in my opinion.
I seem to keep getting into problems (such as the weight painting not saving which was a bug etc.) which were good I guess as it helped me gain knowledge on how to handle those issues however it made the whole process take a lot longer than needed.
Video of the final rig: demonstrating the controls
Cat:
Next is the quadruped model.
It was difficult finding the right tutorial as there are many variations of ways to rig cats. In the end, I found a great video by Richland Gaming Department:
Process:
Similar to the human rig; add the joints first, bind the skin, control curves and weight painting. The main difference was applying the right handles and constraints which was quite challenging for me.
Creating cluster controls for the Ik spline to make the movement more fluid, adding new keys attributes to the channel box for a faster way to control specific areas and so on. I personally find it a lot more difficult than rigging a human since it moves differently.
Nearly forgot to create some controls corves for the ear.
Final rig:
Video of the final rig:
Fish:
Next, is the fish
After rigging the other two I feel like I can rig this simple fish without any tutorials. The only guide I used was some reference photos online of fish rigs so I know how the joints should be positioned.
Finished rig:
I think I did a pretty good job but still, some areas could be improved. Nonetheless, I can animate movement with it which for me is good enough. I think this is my most successful one so far as I knew what I was doing.
Video of the final rig:
Wings:
Lastly, the wings
After a couple of tutorials, I got used to the controls more so this was very quick to rig. I still used a tutorial for this just to ensure I was in the right lane. I probably should've started with the wings or fish first as they were much more manageable/simple than the other two.
A great quick explanatory tutorial by Mike Hermes:
Finished rig:
Video of the final rig:
Final:
Below is just a simple demonstration of all the rigs together. I've planned to keep this animation minimum just to show how the rigs would work together. There's still a lot of improvements to be done as its not prefect considering while animating this I've come across some issues of the rig which I went back to clean up a bit e.g fixing the weight painting again to prevent abnormal twists and distortions from happening in some areas and checking the component editor. However, there are some twists deformation when I move them in an extreme pose which from my research for the solution is to add more joints/controls or move other features along with the main one. Though this doesn't hinder my animation much so it wasn't necessary.
Additionally, some of the controls are only for rotation so I needed to also lock the movement controls in the channel box so the animator wouldn't be able to touch it.
All the rigs:
Action: the guy reaching out to a floating fish as he finds it to be very fascinating. While the cat is preparing to fly.
References: For the fish and wings I needed some guidance on how it should move for the animation. I looked at videos of real fishes as well as animated film 'Finding Nemo' and as for the wings there a video by Gryphern which demonstrates how the wings work.
For layout, I tried to arrange them in a way it will capture well in the one frame. I was actually considering using camera movements but decided to leave it as it might take away the focus on the models' movements on their own. As my main priority is to showcase the rigs I created.
To find a better solution to that I also uploaded it on Sketchfab for great turnaround: Link to Sketchfab: https://skfb.ly/6PHIX
I think the overall look great. The colours blended well with one another. It's not too bright and it gives off an uncanny vibe in my opinion.
Reflective:
Rigging was one of the areas in animation that least interest me but still, I was determined to learn and succeed in it as it will be beneficial to know a gist of every role/skill in animation. Even at the end of this project, I still find rigging to be very difficult to work with and realise that rigging is personally not for my taste. However, I found this personal project to be very insightful as I was able to explore an area I knew I lack in, in skills as well as the knowledge of the role. I understand the terms a lot better now I tested them out. Also now I grasp the idea when rigging I should always be prepared by having a skeleton reference of the object to guide the way to put the joints correctly also I learnt that rigging isn't always limited to one way from the tutorials I've watched.
I found rigging the cat the most difficult to manage as at first, I thought it will be similar to human body joints but no. It's a different animal, therefore, they have different movements especially when it's a quadruped animal. The rigs still aren't up to my standard as there are still some minor deformities though I tried my best. Rigging is still new to me so I will continue to try improving by giving myself personal projects like this such as rigging the face and clothing. From knowing nothing to being able to animate my own rigged model I can say I'm satisfied with my progress in this project.