Character Rigging

Description

A quality character rig is a must for any successful animation production. The rig must be stable, and have the controls and flexibility needed for an animator to tell their story. In addition the rigger must be able to make changes quickly. In this set of lectures, Axel will effectively demystify the "art" of character rigging as well as provide a production-like set of scripted tools to work with. Using the provided scripted tools, Axel demonstrates the benefits of a multi-pose approach to skeleton setup. The separation of deformation and control hierarchies is also used and in conjunction with the pose system, provides the flexibility to easily go back to the bind pose and make changes. Through the process, he details the importance of keeping joint chains planar as well as keeping the joint rotations zeroed out, while showing you how to achieve this through a number of production tricks. Once the joints are all properly mapped, he then moves on to creating the control rig for the character. The next phase involves setting up controls like stretchy IK for the spine, IK and FK with blending for arms and legs, and foot/reverse foot controls. Once the controls are created, Axel wraps things up by generating curve controls for the animators to quickly grab and work with.

Duration: 455 minutes

Format: SD 1024x768