RIGGING A MONSTER
I also collaborated with fellow animator Reece Murray to rig a character he
had modeled for his animated short. This is where my choice to create a
master rig really improved by workflow and cut rigging time exponentially. As
a biped character was able to use the same master rig that I developed for
my character, and just alter it to fit the characters proportions, using the
same techniques I developed for my projects. I was able to learn from my
mistakes rigging my characters, I was prepared for joints to have
miss-matched orientations and I compensated, by checking every suspected
joint after big alterations. I was also able to integrate a wrist twist at the
start of rig creating, instead of at the end, this made it easier to implement.
Using the master rig also gave me access to the same scripts I used to fast
track my rigs, like my personal space switching setup script.
I created the skeleton and controls for the rig, then I passed it onto Reece to
skin, I also had a hand in this, but most of the time I acted as more of a
consultant, as by this time I had made 4 rigs of my own and 3 for other
students and was about to start animating for my own project. Handing over
had its benefits, Reece was able to skin his first character and had someone
at hand to help and make sure he did not make the same mistakes I did.
However, it also had its drawbacks, it was sometimes hard for Reece to add
new controls as he was not fully familiar with the rig setup and the wrist
twist joint was unintentionally deleted close to the deadline, which was only
noticed by me after previewing his animation, I then had to re-add the
control, which took a bit of time.
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