A quick (automated?) way to rig characters?

christopheduron

Hello everyone,

I've been exploring some interesting new guides and came across a guide to create a very detailed sword. What intrigues me in this guide is how he creates decorations of human-like figures in many different poses.

The video below shows the creation of the sword and what i'd like to know is how he rigs his characters so quickly in 3dsmax. He imports his model from Zbrush into max at around 11:50 and he starts posing them at 12:55. Take a look!


The video is sped up quite a bit and i can't seem to figure out how he does it. First he creates a base model in Zbrush which he then imports into 3dsmax and it simply works. Is the rigging process simply left out or is it automated in some way?

Thanks for your time!

thomasp

he just skips the rigging step in that video. you can see he has a biped driving that mesh that he imports from somewhere.

christopheduron

Alright good to know, thanks.

MisterSande

I just came across this.. looks pretty awesome ! (its MAYA though)


https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/learn-explore/caas/CloudHelp/cloudhelp/2016/ENU/Maya/files/GUID-B3131294-73A6-4D29-AA1B-D3B7A8A2136D-htm.html

christopheduron

Looks very useful if you just have to do a quick basic rig.

Let's hope someone made a script or something for max that's similar.

thomasp

hm, biped or one of the CAT rig presets not quick enough for you? there's also various auto-rigger scripts for max out there, e.g. on scriptspot.

christopheduron

I'll look those up. Haven't done much rigging to this point honestly, but seeing it being used as a trick to add beautiful detail to objects is amazing.

musashidan

MisterSande said:

I just came across this.. looks pretty awesome ! (its MAYA though)

Isn't it always.......

For Max check out Rune's Super Simple Rig. It's free to use and is probably the best(constantly updated in production) rig out there for Max. Rivals any of the Maya auto-rig solutions. It doesn't support mocap at present but I just tested it a few nights ago for a UE4 pipe and it worked perfectly first time. Plus it's fantastic to animate with. Personally I'm not a fan of animating with Cat and certainly not Biped. I have requested mocap support as I think it[SSR] could completely replace CAT/Biped as Max's go-to auto-rigging solution if enough interest is generated from the games community. Rune is a VFX artist/director(you might remember him from the Troll Hunter film he created some years back) so the games industry isn't his area of concentration.


http://www.superrune.com/tools/supersimplerig.php

christopheduron

Thanks for the link! When i have some free time i'll definitely look into it.

Cremuss

Blender has two strong, automated human rigging templates that you can use if you're familiar with Blender. Just add a rigify rig in the scene, adjust it to your character's proportion and hit generate. Then you can parent it to your character and use auto-generated skinning (which works okay but has a lot of troubles with floating geometry).