For a non-Rigger, is it easier to rig/animate a character in Maya, or in UE4

PyrZern

This thought has come across my mind, that what I been doing for years now, could have better alternative ways of doing...

I make characters, but I definitely haven't sunk in enough time to do a decent job of rigging models to animate them yet... 

Then I think of the rise of game engines lately, and I wonder; is it more efficient to do it in UE4 ?  I'm not looking for world class AAA game quality rig here, of course. Just body, limbs, hands, fingers, neck, etc. No facial expression.

Thoughts ?

Mark Dygert

If you're a Maya user, you could probably get away with using Epic's Animation Rigging Toolkit. It's pretty good for most things bipedal.
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/Tools/MayaRiggingTool/
 I definitely think it's worth learning how to properly rig characters if that's a direction you're interested in going, because it's not enough to just to rely on another person's auto-rigging script but you need to know how to put them together so you can make all kinds of rigs.
Outside of ART, there are a lot of different auto rigging scripts floating around. 

If you're a max user, I would probably stick with biped or CAT.

kolayamit

What about the Maya autorig, that was added in extension 2. And is available in Maya 2017, is it good?

Mark Dygert

It's nice-ish. It creates a rig that works specifically with HumanIK which is Motion Builder (lite) stuffed into Maya. I like HumanIK / MB for retargeting from one rig to another, recording and cleaning up mocap as well as blending animations together, or if you need one rig to drive another one, like a character picking up another and throwing them. The ragdoll features can be helpful too.  

BUT I don't like using it to animate. It is a very specific system that operates in a very particular way much like biped works inside of max. That knowledge doesn't really translate to other workflows, it's very specific. From an animation perspective it can be difficult and time consuming to get the motions you want when doing hand-key'ed work, especially with non-standard rigs. Simple tools and workflows just aren't there, leading to hours of frustrating, tedious work. Or you dump the motion back on your traditional rig, do what you need and call it good. Which is how it most often gets used.

Stable systems that feature automation have to lock down a lot of functionality and force you to obey a strict set of rules so they can build off of known data. You almost always give up functionality for ease of use. 

The Autorigger that they put in Maya is fairly convoluted to do what are simple tasks and well refined tasks in other workflows. Plus it takes a good deal of time for an animator to get up to speed with it and that knowledge doesn't really cross back and forth. If you learn that system and then run into something it can't do, you end up having to learn the tried and true methods that are used universally everywhere else. You either jump back and forth between those two systems doing each part in each system, or you try to FrankenRig by blend them together so you can operate on them at the same time using the individual system that are available to each workflow, which almost always breaks...

Traditional rigging techniques take more time to setup but with standard rigging, it is a lot more is open to what you can do and it operates exactly how you expect it to and if it doesn't, you can change it. If you have a character with 6 arms, 4 legs and bat wings, you can design a control system that works best for that character. You can drive very complex motions with very simple controls. If you use autorig or try to hook up to humanIK, it falls apart and has trouble or only covers part of the rig, leaving you to duct tape on the functionality that you need. It also leaves you to manage those parts so you end up using a blended workflow and it just gets convoluted.

Most of the time HumanIK gets used as middleware, that's what it was designed to do and what it does really well. So its something you use to shuttle motion between rigs or do complex things with fairly polished motion, easily. But you typically end up applying those results back to your main rig to finish it off and export/render.

So yea it really depends on what someone wants out of it.
- If they are looking to become an animator that can work with traditional rigs, you should learn how most rigs work and it helps to know why and how they are put together. Keep in mind that there are a lot of scripts that automate traditional rigging techniques, ART is one of them.

- If they are looking to just pose something quickly and get some canned animations dropped on it, great autorig will do.

- If they are looking to get into rigging, it's pretty much a bad place to start. They'll have to learn it eventually but it's like trying to learn physics without a working knowledge of basic math.

kolayamit

Thank you for explaining this in detail. Actually i do modeling and texturing, but i want to learn rigging in order to sell some of my assets in Unity Assetstore and Unreal Marketplace. Both marketplaces do not accept Characters without rig(Mixamo rigs are also not accepted). What rigging solution would work best for me.

Mark Dygert

I'm not sure about the unity store but the Unreal Marketplace requires that for bipedal characters, you use their skeleton and that the joints be roughly in the same place as their example file and definitely the same the orientation. That is so your character can use all of the animations available in the market place. If you're character is drastically different joint position than their example skeleton, I suggest using ART so the joints are still oriented the correct way and work with other content within unreal, albeit with freakish proportional differences comes freakish animation but at least the joints will move in the correct directions.

If you create a non-standard character you can use whatever kind of rig you want, because they don't expect your animations to go onto other rigs.

Skeletal meshes (just the skin joints bound to the mesh) are totally required.
I don't think they require app specific rig files, but they will probably include them if you submit them.

kolayamit

Thank you very much!