Character Rigging Industry Entrrance Standard?

Avekt

Hey all,
i am currently studying a games developement course and am finding myself to be enkoying the rigging side of character development very enjoyable. i am wondering what is the minimum standard requirements to hopefully get a career as a character rigger in the industry.

Thanks

ZacD

You will want to have a good demo reel and some rigs for people to look at, expect to be able to rig anything from a person, horse, or squid, to a helicopter, machine with pistons, or functing tank treads. You have to be able to provide any tool an animator would want or need. For next gen games, muscle and cloth rigging and sims are going to be more important.

Look at rigging demo reels on youtube and vimeo to get a better idea.

Never go for the minimum.

Rick Stirling

This is Valmors old reel from a few years ago. Learn everything in here:

http://valmorgarcia.com/

oglu

also take a close look at humanIK in maya/motionbuilder... how it works and how to extend the system to your needs... its the base rig in most mocap driven games...

Fomori

Probably a good idea to start learning Maya (MEL?) or Max Script as well.

Bellsey

check out this career profile from a character TD at Double Negative. It's film and not games I know, but the core skills are essentially the same.

http://www.dneg.com/career_profiles/career_profile_-_character_td_629.html

Denny

In my personal opinion I recommend that you learn the following things. While it may not be evident to others at first glance it is still those details that matter in the end.

* Keep good naming conventions on every object in the scene, especially joints/bones for game engines. It doesn't matter which, just keep one specific convention. The programmers will love you for it.

* Learn to understand vectors and orientations. If you do not understand these fundamental elements of rigging your game ready rigs will do unimaginable things and cause frustration when you add them to the game engine. It also helps understanding vectors when you do constraints, especially aim and orient constraints. As vectors are the fundamental element they are also the cause of flipping, due to mathematical limitations, so if you understand vectors you can fool-proof rigs for specific motions.

* Like others said, learn scripting. Not only do you speed up your workflow, you also learn the underlying structure of the program.

* Be ready to fight with 3dprogram to game engine foes. 3d programs and game engines have different orientations for the world and may cause differences on export. Since FBX started to become a standard it has become less of an issue but it's still there.

* Always make sure your rigs can't be modified by the animator. It is harsh to say this but never trust an animator to understand what makes or breaks a rig. As long as you make the interface to the rig easy to use and the animator gets the functionality (s)he needs, everyone is happy. If you're in Maya for example, make sure to lock every damn attribute that are not supposed to be animated. Trust me when I say that animators will break your rig if they are technically incompetent, which is beside the point to be honest. Animators should do good animation, if they should understand your rig you have either failed your job or not communicated the limitations well.

* There is no such thing as a perfect rig. Learn to balance stability, feature creeping and usability.

slipsius

Im actually kind of in the same boat as you. I got my foot in the door as an animator, and have taken a liking to rigging, so ive been doing more and more at work, but im more of a generalist. Ive been looking into what i need to get a job as a full time rigger somewhere.

Definitely learn python, not mel. Mel is good to know, but really, its better as just a stepping stone into python. Python is much more diverse, and honestly, i find it much easier as well. I strongly suggest eat3d's dvd on intro to maya scripting. It's a short 4.5 hour dvd that will teach you the basics of mel, then gets you into python pretty quickly. It assumes you know nothing about scripting, and will teach you enough to start problem solving on your own. Very very helpful.

Also, from what I can tell, and this could be wrong, but I dont think you need to focus to much on all game related stuff. a LOT of rigging knowledge transfers between film and games, and its best to just be ablet o show what you can do, and that you know how to problem solve, and create rigs that animators like to use. Create your own rig, create a couple of scripts, and then throw it all onto a demo reel. make sure you ahve good skin weights, and i would think you should be good to go.

thatanimator

most studios that I know of use Motion Builder, which comes with it's own rig basically.
don't put all your talent points into rigging and making cute nurb circles in maya, put a couple into Python scripting as well, so that you can expand on for example motion builder rigs and make plugins for animators, like exporters and what not.

oglu

HumanIK channel...
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL86DAA1D36B937329