Animator Friendly Rigging ——II. DEVELOPING AN ANIMATOR FRIENDLY RIG

Animator Friendly Rigging

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

II. DEVELOPING AN ANIMATOR FRIENDLY RIG
Creating a great animation rig isn’t as simple as just adding a series of controls and handing it off to the animator. I’ve found that the best way to solve the problem is to really think about it in a logical way, not just technically, but also artistically. What works as the best “technical” situation, may not always work for the animator. Conversely, what the animator wants may not always be technically feasable.

Developing the Guidelines
What are the guidelines for how you should determine what’s important about how a rig should work? There are two sets of requirements that you must always pay attention to:
• Animation Requirements
      • How the character should act – what does the director want? What kinds of movements will the animator need?
      • What does the character need to be able to do?
• Rig Requirements
      • Standard animation Rig Specs – these are standards that you must follow to ensure consistency with all the animation rigs.
      • How does the animator want to work with the rig.

Solving the Problems
You will have to answer questions and solve problems in order to achieve the requirements specified. The best thing you can do is develop a system that makes it easier to solve these problems. I like to use the following steps:
1. Analyze the problem – what are you trying to solve? What is the expected result? Is it similar to any other solution you’ve come up with before? How can you take advantage of previous solutions? What is the trade-off between functionality and speed? Does it really solve the problem or create other problems?
2. Create a test of the solution – Don’t try and solve the problem elegantly yet, just figure out a way to get it to work correctly and give you the result you’re looking for. It doesn’t have to be fast, it just has to work.
3. Analyze the solution – is this the best workflow for the animator? Is the solution clean? What other problems does it introduce? Are they fixable? What is the best control structure?
4. Re-create the solution cleanly – try and remove any extra steps and nodes. Consolidate everything to the bare minimum. Make sure there is nothing “extra” needed. Ensure that every node and expression is necessary.
5. Re-create again, this time using code that is easy to modify. Document each step so you can easily modify the steps if necessary. Also, take advantage of an “object oriented” approach.. i.e. make sure that everything is done in a way that it can be re-used again. * Note: This is not always necessary, but it can be extremely helpful if you ever need to create that rig again!