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So you're an Animator: Rigging 101 Part 1 · Oct 8, 4:52pm

Objective: Create a simple/effect character/prop rigs and gain an understanding of how to use them both to ease animation.

Welcome to the first part of this tutorial series on character rigging. I’ll be breaking this into the following milestones: joint placement, control systems, weighting, props, constraints.

Milestone 1: Joint Placement

Introduction: Take this part slowly and do it right as joint placement is the single most common error I saw while I was a teaching assistant. I suggest working in wireframe while in orthographic views and flat shaded toggling xray on/off in perspective while doing this. A good rule of thumb for answering where to place joints is to mimic real life. However I tend to make a very strong distinction between human anatomy and cg anatomy. For example I prefer to make my backs straight up and down so that you can scale with ‘expected’ results eg. The character gets taller vertically rather than at an angle. Another example of this is twist joints in the arms versus ulna/radius. Again I will refer to Paul Thuriot’s HyperReal Body series for addition reference.

My methodology:

I block things out in the side view, then the front, then top and then make final adjustments in perspective. It’s important to work in perspective during this final stage as it’s the only view that really defines the relationship between the surface and joints.

Pratical Examples

A sample joint hierarchy:

Sample Joint Hierarchy in Maya, Mirrored Joint Chains and Fingers collapsed

An overall blocking point for joints:

A quick sketch over of a good starting ground for joint placement

With this – I think examples always help steer you to better results quicker. Take a moment and open up free rigs like Generick, Generi, Lowman and observe how other people treat joints in parts of the body.

The Elbow/Knee:

3/4th way back I find preferable

Four examples of knee/elbow joint placement

The Shoulder:

The farther away from the body the more you can collapse the arm without digging into the chest – but the harder it is to control deformation of raised arms. Finding the balance is key.

Two examples of shoulder joint placement

The back:

Straighter the better for scaling backs, However on larger characters you’ll need to remember the further back the joints the more the stomach will overlap.

Two examples of back joint placement

Hopefully that gives you an idea of where I have been placing joints. There is no real strong rule of thumb I can give you as each character is different – it’s an art that really just comes with practice. Just keep in mind the arcs the verts will take from the joints as you place them and in no time you won’t even be thinking of it – well as much.

Orienting Joints

I highly suggest downloading either dwRiggingTools or jason schiefler’s/michael comets joint orientation script. Running them and cleaning your skeleton before you continue will save you from countless odities – the plague of rigging. Small mis-steps constantly can come back to bit you in a snow ball effect.

As far as how to orient the joints. The general rule of thumb I learned with was X down the joint, Z rotating towards the front when possible.

The exeception I like to make is to fudge the ankle rotation a bit so the controllers are flat to the ground and not oriented towards the ball of his feet.

Hand altering rotation axis

Before and After of default rotation axis and fixed for animators

Select the joint, to into sub-object mode (f8 toggles between object/sub-object mode) and in the selection mask at the top you need to enable Local Rotation Axis from here:

A picture of where you can turn on/off local rotation axis in maya

Then just rotate the axis till they are parellel with the ground.

Testing

This is important: While you are new to joint placement go ahead and once you think your done, save the file then bind your character (select the geomeotry then the root joint then in the top menu skin > smooth bind > default settings). Select some joints and even with the default weighting test some areas out, good modeling and good placement should get you close to the desired result. If you notice something amiss open your saved file and repeat as needed.

Next up the control systems for the rig.

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