Rigging – Toadstorm Nerdblog

Maya

Snake rigging in Maya

Last year I worked on a Vikings teaser for King and Country over in Santa Monica. The spot was mostly live-action, but there were a bunch of CG snakes that needed to be added in post, and so I finally got to flex my rigging muscles a little bit.

First, here’s the spot:

Snakes seem like simple problems to solve, since they don’t have shoulders or hips or any other nasty bits that are hard to rig on humans, but the problem lies within the lack of control an animator has over a typical IK spline.

Most simple snake rigs are just that… make an IK spline, cluster the curve, let the animator sort out the rest. Maybe the animator will get lucky and there will be some kind of control hierarchy, but otherwise they’re in for a lot of counter-animating hell. IK splines also suffer from a lack of precision twisting… snakes (especially when you have big piles of them) tend to need to have different twisting rotations along the length of the body, and IK splines can only twist linearly from start to end. Stretching them also typically results in unstable behavior, with the end joint stretching well beyond the intended values, especially when the spline curve is bent quite a bit.

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By toadstorm, 8 years ago

Maya

pole vector constraint moves joints?

I’ve been working on a set of tools for making flexible, twistable arms and legs quickly. I haven’t rigged in a long time, so this has been an arduous process, but I’ll post notes about what I run into along the way. One problem that I remember having over and Read more…

By toadstorm, 12 years ago

Maya

controlling textures with a rig

There are plenty of situations in motion graphics where you have tons of repeating elements. Designers love that kind of thing. You’ll also often be expected to make slight variations of these repeating elements… like a bunch of dots or squares or something that have slightly different textures to them, but are essentially the same thing. You could make a unique shader or a separate referenced asset for each one of these variations, if, say, you really hated yourself. Instead you could build the texture swap right into a rig, so the animator or designer or whoever could just pick a color or a texture for each object while animating the scene. This makes it way easier to direct, and you can just reference the same object over and over again instead of making multiple assets. I was just showing somebody how to do this the other day and figured it’d be a good thing to post about. Here’s how the setup works…

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By toadstorm, 13 years ago