What is a Rigger?

Rigging is a vital process to make a deforming object animated. The term rigging is used for when we create an armature and attach it to a 3D mesh, a good way to think of this would be like adding a skeleton to flesh. Because some models can be very high in geometry, it would be very difficult to manually move around the vertices ourselves, hence the use of rigging.

 

In Skeletal Animation, rigging is made up of bones. Each bone's position, scale and orientation can be transformed, alongside be parented to other bones to affect the overall pose, this is why we also add weight to the rigging. A bone would be associated with a group of vertexes on a mesh, which if was on a character would most likely represent a human like skeletal structure.

For the rig to work properly, the bones and joints must follow a logical hierarchy. The first joint placed onto a skeleton is called the root join and every subsequent joint connects to the root either directly or indirectly from another joint.

 

These are useful for the animator to focus on the movement at a large scale without having to manipulate each vertex and by having a bone structure, this allows the animator to refer to a natural anatomy movement. The only issue of animating in this way, if this is a lifelike character. It does not allow the mesh to create a realistic muscle and skin movement. This would have to be done using a separate muscle controller, attached to the bones.

 

Forward and Inverse kinematics are used to calculate the joint movements of a fully rigged character. A forward kinematics can only affect parts of the skeleton which fall below it on the joint hierarchy, where as with Inverse kinematics, the terminating joint is placed directly by the animator, whilst the joints above it are automatically interpolated by the software.

 

A Rigger gets involved with the Animation pipeline at the pre-production phase during the character design, since the character designs will determine the rig structure. The rigging begins once the character has been fully modeled. A character rigger would be responsible for building the virtual character skeletons and control rigs, setting deformable weighting, applying skins and creating facial shapes which are then later used by the animator. The Rigger will also write MEL scripts to streamline art production pipelines and develop new pipeline solutions to adapt to the changing needs of the animation team and to keep up the work flow.

 

Character rigging is a solitary task and requires a fair amount of group planning at the outset. Collaboration with the Animators is vital and having good communication and teamwork skills is needed for this role. A rig created needs to be as user friendly as possible in order to make the Animator's job easier and to save time.