Rigging for Games

hannah_b

Hi everyone, 

I've taken on doing a rig that's to go into a games engine, I'm following along with a games tutorial, but he's made no mention of an origin joint which I know i need. I was wondering how this will combine later on with my IK and FK joints. In my head i'm thinking I need to create a bind skeleton which is what I'll skin too that stems from my origin joint at 0/0/0, but IK/FK skeletons can be floating and they will drive the bind skeleton? Is this correct?

 Im at the point where I need to start getting everything bound so any feedback/comments would be appreciated 

- Happy Holidays All 

Archanex

You will probably want a bone at the origin if you want to put this into a game engine (though it isn't always absolutely neccesary). The good news is it's very easy to add at the end since it's at the top of the hierarchy, just create a joint and then parent your hip bone to your "origin bone" (usually called a root bone)

as far as giving feedback, it's difficult to recommend much since we haven't seen any of your rig or how it works, or how you would like it to work

Hito

bind joints, anything in the skin cluster/skin modifier, are the ones you need to export with animation ultimately. you can place extra joints for attachment nodes but those can be added in engine or before, not strictly required in the rig.  Anything that will go into the engine should be under a single hierarchy, top node being the root node, it can be a null/locator/dummy/joint, whatever, engines are pretty flexible.

Anything else you add to help with animation, FK/IK, controls, etc, will get dropped before export, those should be in separate hierarchies depending on how you set up the control rig.

you can grab some mocap files from mixamo, characterize the bind skeleton with HumanIK and test out the weights without much work.

hannah_b

thank you so much for that really helpful, 

I thought I had posted in the wrong area so I've started a thread in the technical talk forum 
link to it is here

http://polycount.com/discussion/181678/rigging-feedback/p1?new=1