Rigging and Parallel Workflows - Week 5 Iron Brawlers
The days are growing longer, and it feels like we’re finally moving towards summer here in Wellington. Billboards line the streets in the lead up to the coming election; there is a general feeling of relief after returning to Covid-19 level one. It’s easy to forget that our circumstances are unique here in NZ. Meanwhile, my brain is deep in rigging-land building an IK / FK skeleton for Iron Brawlers.
We’re one week into Alpha (4 weeks total). Dante is setting up our environment asset pipeline, building our first stage, and Josh…well Josh is doing all the hard stuff really: refactoring code, moving from a collider system to raycasts and trying to build a custom hit-detection system. I’m stepping out of Unity for a while, building our base character rig in Maya while Christa brings Dante’s concepts into three dimensions.
I spent the first couple of days reinforcing the foundations of my rigging knowledge: I’ve made rigs before, but I’ve often felt like I didn’t understand the core concepts behind what I was doing. My Game Art course covers a broad range of topics and it’s not possible to cover them all in great depth. Rigging is something that we are expected to learn in our own time if we are wanting to specialise in technical art.
Lucky enough, this was a quick fix. We realised that Christa had made some minor diversions from the reference while I was following it exactly. Switching Christa’s scene to the same scale as mine (metres) cleaned up the other issues we had and the mesh lined up perfectly with the skeleton. This was a great lesson in setting up pipelines: we discovered the importance of making a clear plan for how we would work cooperatively. We thought this approach would save us a lot of time, and in the long run, it has. It’s just lucky that we found a work around early that didn’t require rebuilding anything from scratch.
It’s now the start of week six, two weeks away from alpha. The rig is mostly finished - I just need to build blendshapes once Christa has finalised the character’s head. Last week I shot video reference for Flower Boi’s animations (which was one of the goofiest things I've done, but a lot of fun!). This week I’ll be blocking out a run cycle and basic attacks before implementing them in engine, next week.
We’re one week into Alpha (4 weeks total). Dante is setting up our environment asset pipeline, building our first stage, and Josh…well Josh is doing all the hard stuff really: refactoring code, moving from a collider system to raycasts and trying to build a custom hit-detection system. I’m stepping out of Unity for a while, building our base character rig in Maya while Christa brings Dante’s concepts into three dimensions.
I spent the first couple of days reinforcing the foundations of my rigging knowledge: I’ve made rigs before, but I’ve often felt like I didn’t understand the core concepts behind what I was doing. My Game Art course covers a broad range of topics and it’s not possible to cover them all in great depth. Rigging is something that we are expected to learn in our own time if we are wanting to specialise in technical art.
While planning out the features I wanted for our rig, I was lucky enough to stumble across an awesome Youtube series from AntiCGi that explains step-by-step how to build a bipedal rig with IK/FK switching. I highly recommend this series to anyone wanting to level up their rigging skills - the first four episodes in the series are particularly important as they explain the core concepts used in the actual rigging process. He explains the importance of joint orientations, teaches you how to use constraints effectively, and even how to create custom attributes to drive hand and foot motion which can dramatically speed up an animator’s job.
No tutorial is perfect; there are always going to be a few gaps that you’ll need to fill in for yourself. I hit a pretty big hurdle when it came to mirroring the rig from left to right. AntiCGi’s tutorial focuses on building the left arm and then leaves it to the student to repeat the process for the leg. This is simple enough, but when it comes to mirroring those limbs it’s easy to run into issues with joint orientation. For a new rigger, it’s also pretty confusing to have to rebuild your constraints from scratch on a mirror joint chain. All your joints and controls are there, but what was parent constrained to what? This part took me the longest time but was definitely the most valuable for my learning because I wasn’t just following a tutorial; I was reconnecting the mechanisms within the rig, reinforcing my understanding of how those joints and controls interact.
No tutorial is perfect; there are always going to be a few gaps that you’ll need to fill in for yourself. I hit a pretty big hurdle when it came to mirroring the rig from left to right. AntiCGi’s tutorial focuses on building the left arm and then leaves it to the student to repeat the process for the leg. This is simple enough, but when it comes to mirroring those limbs it’s easy to run into issues with joint orientation. For a new rigger, it’s also pretty confusing to have to rebuild your constraints from scratch on a mirror joint chain. All your joints and controls are there, but what was parent constrained to what? This part took me the longest time but was definitely the most valuable for my learning because I wasn’t just following a tutorial; I was reconnecting the mechanisms within the rig, reinforcing my understanding of how those joints and controls interact.
Parallel workflows - rigging before the model is done
In the third week of development, Christa and I ran into a little problem. We had decided to work parallel: she would build the character model while I built the rig. We set out using Dante’s concepts as reference. I figured that so long as the dummy mesh I built lined up with the same concept images Christa was using, it would be as simple as dragging and dropping new mesh iterations into my rigging project and hitting “bind skin”. Christa and I failed to discuss how we would handle this before she passed me her first version of the mesh. What we discovered was that the geo would not line up with the rig - even the scale of our scenes was different!Lucky enough, this was a quick fix. We realised that Christa had made some minor diversions from the reference while I was following it exactly. Switching Christa’s scene to the same scale as mine (metres) cleaned up the other issues we had and the mesh lined up perfectly with the skeleton. This was a great lesson in setting up pipelines: we discovered the importance of making a clear plan for how we would work cooperatively. We thought this approach would save us a lot of time, and in the long run, it has. It’s just lucky that we found a work around early that didn’t require rebuilding anything from scratch.
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| Rigging Progress - Week 5 |
It’s now the start of week six, two weeks away from alpha. The rig is mostly finished - I just need to build blendshapes once Christa has finalised the character’s head. Last week I shot video reference for Flower Boi’s animations (which was one of the goofiest things I've done, but a lot of fun!). This week I’ll be blocking out a run cycle and basic attacks before implementing them in engine, next week.