Animator Friendly Rigging —— I. INTRODUCTION

Animator Friendly Rigging

Creating animation rigs which solve problems, are fun to use,and don’t cause nervous breakdowns. ——Jason Schleifer

I. INTRODUCTION

There is at least one indisputable fact known to animators all over the world:
achieving quality animation with a substandard rig can cause more heartache,
headache, hair loss, and general insanity than trying to run a marathon backwards
in flip-flops while tossing jellybeans into your mouth.Imagine you’re driving a car and every
time you turn the wheel to the right, the windshield wipers go off. Then you turn the wheel to the left and the car accelerates. When you press the gas—the stereo gets louder. When you try and change stations, the car reverses slowly.Sure, you could eventually drive somewhere, but the frustration that would ensue would be sure to make your life a living hell.. and in fact, you’d probably never want to drive again. A good animation rig, on the other hand, will work the way you expect. The controls will make sense, be easy to understand, placed in a location that you
expect, and work in a consistent manner. A rig that has been created with the animator’s needs in mind, will be a joy to work with, and allow the animator to think more about their performance and less about how to wrestle the darn thing into submission. But What is Animation Rigging? Simply put, animation rigging is: A process by which an “object” is made ready for animation. This means that animation rigging is the act of taking any object, character,
prop, anything that the animator is going to animate, and making it possible for them to move around and set keyframes. Notice that the definition above states objects instead of characters. It’s easy to forget that anything the animated character has to pick up and move also needs to be set up for animation by the rigger. You can liken an animation rigger to a Marionette Maker. A person who builds marionettes creates a puppet, attaches strings to the arms, head and body, and then attaches those strings to little bits of wood. They prepare the puppet to be moved around by the puppeteer. An animation rigger does not have to be a puppeteer, but they do have to understand what a puppeteer needs in order to create a believable performance.

Your role as an animation rigger is to balance:
1. The performance requirements of the character or prop.
2. The manipulation/interaction needs of the animator.
3. The technical requirements of the character or prop.

Many times, these needs will conflict with each other. For example, imagine you have an extremely realistic creature that is being animated, but the animator wants to be able to stretch the character’s body in a physically impossible way in order to make the pose read from the camera angle. What do you do? Provide non-realistic animation controls that may break the rig? Tell the animator “no, you can’t do that”? That’s your job, to determine what exactly is possible and to balance the positives and negatives of each situation. Of course, as an animator I would say that my needs were more important than any silly biomechanical necessities of the skinning rig. Important Criteria for Each Animation Rig In order to create the best rigs possible for any production situation, it is important to figure out exactly what problems you’re trying to solve before just throwing solutions at them. The choices you make in determining how your

animation rigs work should all meet the following criteria:
• Consistent/Predictable behavior
• Simplified control structure
• Easy to use
• Fast interaction
• Minimal counter-animation
• Solve the problem
• Allows the animator to do their job without compromising their ideas.

If these criteria aren’t met, the rig will not work as the animator expects, and will cause frustration. Animating is hard enough without having to fight the tool every step of the way.