RIGGING?? advice
I am an Artist, and I have decided to start the painful yet interesting new road of learning how to rig for games/animation:shifty:
I know that rigging for games and animation are slightly different, but the theory is all the same. I have not rigged anything since schooling and that experience nearly drove me to drink, that and the early stages of carpel tunnel set in.
But I was wondering if anyone had any resources for learning how to rig for games, for some reason that seems like an easier stepping stone for now,
that and everything on the net is animation.
I know that rigging for games and animation are slightly different, but the theory is all the same. I have not rigged anything since schooling and that experience nearly drove me to drink, that and the early stages of carpel tunnel set in.
But I was wondering if anyone had any resources for learning how to rig for games, for some reason that seems like an easier stepping stone for now,
that and everything on the net is animation.
Replies
The general rule of thumb for all engines i've worked with is to make sure that the animation information is being carried into the joints upon export. So unless you have an engine that supports vertex animation, leave out morph targets, simulations (unless bakeable) and crazy deformers.
Learn the techniques from both sides, and then adapt it to games!
The only way to learn rigging is to do it. I threw in the towel about 5 times before I finally got a model up and "running". Rigging definitely rewards those who stick with it and see it through, unfortunately there is no easy way.
Oh and most importantly, if it's a female character you are rigging, remember to weight the bewbs.
Try to look at rigging from an animator's perspective, try different types of rigs, animate with them, learn the pros and cons.
Mess around with getting things into some sort of videogame engine.
While we have these engines nowadays that tout alot of realtime physics and stuff, that sort of thing is very cpu costly and unless an integral part of the game tends to be baked down to bones, so learn how to simulate stuff like hair/clothing etc for a character or flags/collapsing structures etc for environments.
If you google his name, you may be able to find out the url
http://www.squeezestudio.com/animation-insiders-ebook.html
James Haywood is a kick ass technical artists at Bungie and he had a few pages on his site dedicated to going over the pros and cons of some of the typical techniques used, its pretty old but still some good info worth reading. You can pick up a lot of common techniques here and then probably google specific tutorials.
http://www.jhaywood.com/croiProject.htm
The Area also is a good source for tutorials
http://area.autodesk.com/louis_tutorials/animation_and_rigging_techniques_for_architecture_visualization Basic rigging techniques, they geared it toward Arch/Vis but they explain them well and get used for so much more.
http://area.autodesk.com/tutorials?word=rigging&where=1&software=1&tutotips=&level= More generalized rigging tutorials
For topology, joint placement and skin weights check out:
http://www.hippydrome.com/
A lot of tutorials will seem specific to the 3D apps they are in but actually there is a lot of cross over and the techniques don't change that much.
3dmotive.com has some good tutorials in Maya.
www.3DTotal.com has some good tutorials on rigging.
http://www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial.php?catDisplay=1&subcat=26&sort=date&order=1&detailsoff=0&roPos=1
www.eat3d.com also has a facial rigging tutorial for games, I thought they also had one for full body rigging but its not jumping out at me...
Last but not least 3dsmax has some really good basic tutorials included (Help > Tutorials), Which is one reason you don't see a lot of basic tutorials for 3dsmax or if you do, they're done by people who didn't know they existed and normally suck...
https://www.cg-academy.net/es_catalog/index.php?cPath=22&osCsid=dl4q5je598qvijnuvlrhtf5q70826r98
You can find his website here which has some amazing resources http://www.paulneale.com/