Dev Blog 5: Rigging the Vessels

Hello and welcome to another Dev Blog! My name is Mo Morris and I am the art lead for The Curators. I spend a lot of my time managing the other five artists and keeping our artist backlog up to date so we keep moving forward with production. However, for this blog, I'm talking about the rigging process for our characters. I've been rigging for a few years now and I got to learn more of the character pipeline. Allen and I sculpted both of the characters in a program called Zbrush.

The rigging process begins with setting up joints, which I have pictured above. These joints are similar to the bones of a human skeleton and I use them to help move the character mesh as a person would move.

Next up is to create controls. The controls are necessary to make the animating process easier for animators. They are also what the animator uses to save the keys to make a final animation. The controls seem pretty simple, but through the years I have learned how to make more complicated controls and how to set them up. When I first started, I didn't realize the importance of a proper control set up on a rig. Now though, they have upped the quality of my rigs significantly.

Rigging is a complicated process and the first two steps are easy enough to pick up with time and attention to detail, but the reason most people despise rigging is because of skin weighting. The easiest way to describe what skin weights are is to compare them to the muscles on the human body. Without the skin weights, the character wouldn't be able to actually move with the joints. In the GIF above you can see the importance of the controls in moving the character around for my skin weighting test. This is just the autobind skin weights so they aren't perfect. The 3D program we are using, Autodesk Maya, has a lot to help beginner riggers learn the process of skin weights with this autobinding.

Here is an inside look the starting skin weights with the autobind. I use a color ramp instead of a greyscale so I can better see all the influence on the mesh while I am working. There are multiple ways to edit the influence and it changes based on what joint I have selected. In the picture above I have the skin weight painting brush, but there is always a skin weight selection brush which is more for specific detail in the skin weighting process. Then it's just a matter of working through the joints I have added and making sure they only influence the part of the mesh that will have the character move properly with the controls. Depending on the complexity of a model and rig skin weighting can take anywhere from a couple hours to multiple days worth of work.

Finally, here is a GIF of the final character rig for the Young Vessel. I only had to make slight changes to the skin weights and spent most of my time hunting down rogue influences that were attached to the wrong joints. We now have both vessels rigged and ready for animation which will be completed in the coming weeks!