Best way to start rigging a 3D model?

amonyte

Hi, first post here 

I recently started working on some projects with Unreal and Unity engines, and came to a point where I need to import a custom character mesh, and map animations to it. This requires a rigged model i.e. one that contains a skeleton. The resource I'm trying to use does not have any skeleton so I'm trying to find a good way to easily rig the model

Tried Mixamo / Adobe Fuse but it did not work with the resources I tried. I have Zbrush and Blender available, but not Maya currently.

Can anyone suggest a good way to get started rigging 3d models? Are there auto-rigging plugins or standalone software out there?  

Hito

mixamo should give okay results, IIRC you should upload the mesh in T-Pose instead of A-Pose. Outside of Mixamo your options are Max/Maya/Blender/Modo/Houdini etc. Zbrush doesn't do skeletons and skinned meshes AFAIK.

you can pull a sample character out of UE or Unity, use the skeleton from those and adjust the joints to fit your character. after that weigh your mesh to the skeleton and export the FBX back to the engine and you can get on with retargting from there. Depending on how similar your character is compared to the sample characters there are tools to help making the skinning process little less tedious. In Maya it's Soft Bind; in Max it's Skin Modifier; in Blender it's Armature modifier IIRC.

There are several good rigging tools for Maya, AdvancedSkeleton; RapidRig; Anzovin Setup Machine to name a few. Maya has HumanIK as well for out of the box humanoid rigging. All have game friendly options

Max has Biped and CAT, both can be game compatible.

The minimum you need to skin the mesh to a skeleton, and a bunch of different ways to skin a cat.

musashidan

It doesn't get much simpler than mixamo, if you're looking for an easy way out. I suggest trying it again. There is even a special Unity download option, to make it even easier.

Mark Dygert

If you're using Maya the Quick Rig is even easier than Maximo and it gives better results, plus it plugs into HumanIK so you can drop animations on it with barely any effort. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1L3Unmm588

But there are two downfalls to Quick Rig, 1) it doesn't do fingers. 2) It only handles bipedal characters.

With any automated solution you end up giving up a lot of flexibility for speed, but "you get what you get and you can't get upset" because it's a magical black box that mostly did it right... sortof...

Actually digging into rigging and learning it fully, is a very technical form of art that a lot of artists and animators shy away from. It's a deep rabbit hole... It's one I think everyone should dive down, even if they don't stay for very long. It informs artists how characters are manipulated and it helps animators understand the systems they are interacting with.

I personally like Advance Skeleton because it sits halfway between one button wonders and actual rigging. It builds any kind of creature you want and the rigs it builds in seconds are pretty much just automated versions of what you could build yourself in hours.

Advance Skeleton has a tiny learning curve compared to one button wonders like Quick Rig or Maximo but after you watch a 10min video you've got all the info and you're up and running.
Place joints, build rig, geodesic voxel skinning, a little paint weight clean up and you're off.

It beats spending 200+ hours learning to rig a flour sack, not that there is anything wrong with that but it can take months or years to learn how to build quality stable rigs.

FourtyNights

My experience with Mixamo is quite good. It works surprisingly good, but I wish they had a bit better joint placement. Would be cool to place joints more precisely to the median points of the centered edge loops on the deforming limbs and parts.

Another thing that could speed up skinning is the delta mush technique. Character TD, Hans Godard at Naughty Dog has some serious skills in that regard. Even though he uses his own tools, I think at least the delta mush was added to Maya recently.


My problem with rigging a character isn't the rigging aka building joints and controllers, but it's the skinning. That's awful, and I'd like to get a REALLY good automated skin weights to start with (something like what Hans got in his video). I don't mind fixing minor skin weight problem areas here and there, but painting bigger problem areas or from a scratch is just horrible.

kanga

Im not sure what you want exactly from the model, but if you use a compatible unreal rig you can use their stock motions. Unity is a bit more forgiving.

Mark Dygert

Delta Mush in game engines would be a huge hit to performance or the game would have to be limited in some other way to allow for enough resources. So we're stuck with traditional skinning methods. Thank goodness for geodesic voxel skinning.

musashidan

@markdygert Max has a great delta mush to skin plugin that converts the data to skin weights and bakes it in. Works perfect in the UE tests I've done.

Mark Dygert

Yea, maya has it too but both of them are this is the "best we can do" scenario and not the same thing as having it active. Still, the few extra steps are worth it in some cases, for most character geodesic works great and is faster.