Rigging

The following videos and images are all windows into my general rigging skills. One of my long standing responsibilities as a Technical Artist is that of rigging and all things related to the more technical aspects of animation. Some of the content dates back a few years, but forms the backbone of a pipeline I developed and continue to build on.

The first video here demonstrates a bipedal auto-setup solution I developed over a 6 month period at Blackrock Games. the intention of all this was to bring character based gameplay and cinematic sequences into the cancelled project "Split Second 2". I built this solution from the ground up, which also included an entire data export and management pipeline for a full spectrum of asset types besides animation.

Working closely with animators over the years, and having delivered a considerable amount of animation work myself, I am no stranger to the usefulness of having a tool to manage and apply poses. Typically, poses are associated with a given character or rig and are bound to specific control names in order to work. The Pose Clipboard is my attempt to abstract away from a very single-use tool and offer a solution that operates in a more generalised manner. Under the hood I'm doing quite a lot to establish the inherent structure in the data being "captured" by the tool and I expose a number of ways for animators to work this data. The following image shows the interface:

The next video shows a quick demonstration of how setting various flags associated with the data captured by the tool, can yield a number of different outputs and allow the user to apply pose data in a very selective way.

This next video shows basic IK to FK and FK to IK switching that I had built in to my rigging tools.

Part of the general animation tools that wrap around my custom rigging pipeline. This utility method is a one click solution to match either fk to ik, or ik to fk, for both the arms and legs.

At the heart of a solid rig is a solid skeleton with clean joint orientations. This will always yield the most predictable and controlled range of movement. If you layer a good rig onto a badly composed skeleton you'll always be fighting a losing battle. Its a fundamental principle that I still find is overlooked. This next video shows a custom joint orientation solver I wrote for Maya that allows joint orientation to be solved even if the joint is "off-axis", something that Maya's native solution cannot do.

This is a custom joint orientation solver I wrote as part of the rigging pipeline for Blackrock Studio. The solver is used as part of the auto rigging tools but I also expose it through a general rigging tools utilities interface so it can be used for non-automated rigging tasks. It accepts 2 objects to compute an orientation matrix for a given joint. The first object is typically the child joint of the joint being orientated and is used to determine the forward vector. The second object is used to determine an up vector. In this video, the object used to determine the up vector is the yellow locator. I compute the cross product of the forward and up vectors to get my right vector, and then cross the right with the existing forward vector to get my *actual* up vector. I then build a 4x4 matrix from the resulting 3 vectors (with the 4th row empty) and feed this into Maya's xform function to set the absolute orientation of the joint and then set zeroScaleOrient on the joint itself.