Begginer's rigging question

macke

Hi Everyone,

After watching many youtube rigging tutorial, I have been trying to figure out for some time now, why people create groups for curve controllers. What do those groups help to offset? Very similar as why we need controllers for joints? You could easily animate the joints, but i don't understand why that's a big no no? thank you for your time.

RN

I'm guessing you're talking about Maya, right? As I understand it, you create a group (AKA a helper / pivot / empty / null) because every object parented to that group will have its origin as the location of that group, so if you reset the position of any child object to (0,0,0), they will snap to their parent (that group). 
This is useful to define the "bind position" of an object, the initial position of that object within that rig. 
I imagine if you didn't have any group for a certain controller, resetting it to (0,0,0) would snap it to the scene origin.

As for having curve controllers instead of animating the joints directly, it's just a nicer interface for the animator I guess? Your joints / skeleton is usually inside the volume of the mesh, and most of the time you'll have several helper joints in some kind of mechanism, so having curve controllers will not only hide all the clockwork but also make it easier for the animator to pick those objects because their shapes are outside of the mesh, not inside. 
When you're animating and focused and 'in the zone', having to stop what you're doing just to select something can become very annoying, so the rig should help with this and be intuitive.

macke

Thank you for the answer. It made it clearer for me to understand the usage of it. I think the more i make use of it, I will understand it better

carvuliero

"why people create groups for curve controllers. What do those groups help to offset?"

::That will depends but I can think of 2 cases

- to clean the transformation node

- to have pivot point on a different position

"why we need controllers for joints? You could easily animate the joints, but i don't understand why that's a big no no? "

:: of course you can for something simpler you wont need control curves .Probably the best answer is so the animator cant break the rig with

all the set up you hide everything but control curves which make it idiot proof also as RN said it much easier to select stuff and speed the workflow