The Art of Rigging

Above: Me attempting to learn how to rig today.

Today I spent the better part of my morning and afternoon following an excellent tutorial that takes you step-by-step through the entire production pipeline in order to create a transforming robot. While much of the pipeline, especially the concept art and modeling stages, greatly interest me, I've felt for a while now that, as an animator, one of the most valuable skill-sets I can learn to compliment my focus is rigging.

For anyone who doesn't know, rigging is a highly structured process that involves creating a skeleton out of joints, creating controls that drive these joints, skinning a mesh (3d model) to the skeleton, painting the skin weights (how the skin deforms when flexed, relaxed, or tensed), and a whole other host of additional processes (dynamics, skin clusters, GUIs, etc.).

I have always wanted to create my own character for my animation reel, namely one of my Cactoid creatures some of you may have seen. While this is a large reason for my desire to learn this new skill-set, there is much more to it than that.

Whereas animation is a somewhat structured, but mostly free-flowing and pure form of art, rigging is rigid, unforgiving, and requires a whole different mentality when approached compared to animation. One could say that animation is like water-bending, while rigging is akin to earth-bending (by the way, I'm an "Avatard" if you didn't already know). A great advantage to being an animator and rigger is that you know exactly what sorts of tools you want and how to lay them out intuitively for other animators.

What I hope to get out of rigging is an improved ability to think more technically when problem-solving and recognize where I can use clever tricks and techniques to speed up my workflow in animation. Forcing myself to try and understand the more of the technical aspects of Maya will be a challenge, but the reward will be sweet.