Rigging

This is the start of my new iniative called stop working for five minutes to actually post updates of the work on my blog, as it has been some what neglected recently. As the title suggests this short post is going to be about the joys of rigging. They way I am writing this may seem laced with sarcasm suggesting that rigging is in fact not a joy to do, anyone who interprets it this way your about half right. I've had a bit of a love hate relationship with said rigging. But as far as I can tell rigging is all about problem solving and that in a lot of ways has been fun, there have been plenty of tearing my hair out moments (the aforemention hate part of the relationship) but it is cool facilitating animators with the ability to make the creations you've built dance around. I am pretty sure that the 3D art and modelling side of the cg pipeline is for me, however I do feel that knowing how to pose a character in maya by implementing a decent rig is a good thing, in fact anything that gets rid of boring t-pose characters is a good thing, for instance transpose in zbrush. But anyway I have digressed a fair bit. Key points, rigging more fun than I thought, I am no rigging/mel scripting genius my rigs have been a combination of tutorials for rigging different body bits that have then been frankensteined together to form a rig, which has resulted in mixed success. That said I think I am at the stage now, on rig version 4 that is should meet all the requirements for this project so I can stop rigging for a bit and go back to the stuff I really enjoy. I am currently rigging the arms and the picture below shows my ik/fk switch arm I am creating, I really like this screen shot because it demonstrates the most complicated and "what the hell is going on there" (thats the expression non riggers have) piece of rigging I can do. My next post in theory will be a quick recap of all the rigs I've built, all four of them, and a bit of analysis, what was good/bad/hilariously bad (you really should see some of the things that rig version 2 did to our skinned characters head and neck, I may make a blooper real style vid documenting it). Anyway thanks for reading if you read this, apologies for use of made up words and stuff spelt inside out etc, this is the general disclaimer that comes with most of my written work.