Karen Halliwell Rigging #2
I'm gonna split my rigging posts up into a few, just so they don't get overly long, no one likes an overly long blog post.
Next on the rigging to do list was the spine, this was probably the part I was most confused about on the day.
We started by making the simple joints as you would expect, when I've rigged before it was simple FK controls, however with this we first set up an IK Spline, which is essentially a curve that controls the joints, and the curve itself can be manipulated anywhere along it via clusters, simples!?
So controls move the Clusters, which moves the curve, which moves the joints.
This is where things get more complicated, this spine has FK and IK controls.
This allows for a good level of control when positioning the spine, but it also would allow you to go on and make it switchable, so the animator could work with the spine in FK or IK, depending on how they like to work, or what the shot needed.
The leg has also now been constrained to the leg. This is where the groups come in handy, because the constraint can't be applied from the main controller directly to the bone, it has to be constrained to the bones overall group. But then if the leg needed to be changed, its just one constraint to remove to swap in a new leg.
This allows for a good level of control when positioning the spine, but it also would allow you to go on and make it switchable, so the animator could work with the spine in FK or IK, depending on how they like to work, or what the shot needed.
The leg has also now been constrained to the leg. This is where the groups come in handy, because the constraint can't be applied from the main controller directly to the bone, it has to be constrained to the bones overall group. But then if the leg needed to be changed, its just one constraint to remove to swap in a new leg.
One other interesting thing we learnt was alternatives to constraints in rigging. Constraints are good, because they allow you to connect different controls and bones together easily and they will work. But it's more efficient to use either the connection editor or the node editor. What this allows is the data from one control to bed piped directly into something else.
For example the translate X, Y and Z of a cube, directly into the translate of a spheres X, Y and Z, when the cube is moved, the sphere moves exactly the same, similar to a constraint, but much more efficient for Maya to work with.
However this only works if the axes of the two objects are the same, so this is where all the offset groups need to be correctly used and oriented with their bones, so the axes match.
It'll be something I bear in mind, and did use to my advantage when rigging for the 3rd year film, Drone.
