Animation – Rigging

I found myself last Animation class not only heavily enjoying myself, but asking the teacher for additional Information about the topic. I found what we learned most enjoyable that I was even able to recall it days later and tutor my fellow classmates while they had completely forgotten without reviewing their notes.

Rigging, what is it? Rigging is the term Digital Animators used to describe an object that had the Bone Deformers enveloped properly, but the Bones need more Control. Rigging is giving the bones the control they need.

for example, you have a character walking, you could either envelop the bones, then animate the bones individually, tweaking them as you go along, making changes, and then spending five hours till you get the right look. Or you can take ten minutes to properly rig the character, that cuts time spent on animating from five hours to Ten minutes, instead of dealing with all the bones in a chain, you can rig it, use the rig, and only have to deal with one or two elements with the best control and letting the IK or FK take it’s effect.

I remember learning how to rig characters in high school, I covered that topic on the side of my other projects, it worked out nicely, but I didn’t recall how much fun it was until I got it to work on our current projects. I have all ways liked Animation the most over my other class’s here at BCIT, and not only because it is the only class I have that writes notes on the white board for us to take down, (I find it hard and somewhat annoying in my other class’s how they will just talk and explain everything for three hours straight, but then they never give us any straight notes.) but because I just love the Idea of bringing your 3D world to life. Sure it is pretty cool to make something that looks absolutely amazing, but I find it a lot more interesting if you can take that what you made, and bring it to life.

~ by B-man on March 11, 2008.