Friday 17 October 2014

Rigging/joint systems

Rigging is adding a digital skeleton to a 3d mesh. It’s basically a real skeleton within the mesh with the rigger adding joints and bones, which can be used by animators to bend the character/ 3d mesh in anyway or pose they want. A rig can take many hours to get to create even the simplest ones where it’s only using a few joints.  But when finish a 3d model will be giving to an animator for them to work their magic on it. In theory the rigger has one of the hardest jobs by having to do multiple things to make the models move correctly and so it’s an easier job for the animator.

Joints chains/joint systems are the same as bones and joints within a real skeleton. When two joints are created one after the other they are joined and make the start of a chain. The first joint in the chain is the root joint which when select can move the entire chain. But if you select the joint below the root all other joints below the one you selected will move as well. The join hierarchy will eventually get bigger and when you add other chains/systems to each other where you have to remember which one is your root so you can easily move things about.

When a joint system is bound to a 3d mesh they have to do a thing called weight painting when the 3d mesh is freshly bound to the skeleton the weights can be all over the place . So weight painting is changing that so everything can move more affectively. You do this mainly because sometimes strange thing can happen where the shoulders can effect near the stomach area on a rig. It’s really simple how to weight paint or it is for me at least. You have to decide where each joint has influence on so no strange things happen. You don’t want to animate the legs and a few faces from the shoulder move up and make some spikes. I use the weight painting tool in black and white mode because I feel that is more helpful for me. White is the maximum of influence and black is no influence in the tap its 0-1 so having a 0.5 is a grey that gives an ok bit of influence to the selected joint.

The link below has helped me a bit to get back in the groove of things with rigging and to find/see if there are any new tips and tricks around I could use.

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