Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Sandy Sutherland]

Hi Guys,

Quick question - what do you guys think would be the best Rigging or Character TD type course to have someone take - would be ideally an online type course.

Currently the idea is to start with the 8 week Facial Rigging by Judd Simantov off cgsociety - http://workshops.cgsociety.org/courseinfo.php?id=275  - anyone done this course, it looks quite good but I am concerned it is Maya-centric?

This is for one of our Riggers who is going for the lead role.

Thanks for any input.

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

[Eric Thivierge]

Its a tough call. I only took the general TD with Python in XSI with Raf. Hopefully they'll be selling it stand alone shortly. I haven't seen any others that are terribly appealing. Not saying they don't offer great quality but its hard to tell without word of mouth and recommendations, basically what you're asking for. :)

Overall I think rigging-wise you can get a lot out of rigging courses even if they are Maya based. It's more the concepts and approaches than actual application. If you're going to a course to just see how to push this button and then this one, then this one... so on and so on, you're not going to get anything out of it. I'd try to find a bunch of different course and see if you can email the instructor ahead of time to get an overview of the course and ask more in depth questions about what you're hoping to learn from it. Also ask for references that you can email / ask opinions in regards to the course.

I have a mixed riggng experience from XSI to Maya and back and many rigging concepts are universal. Implementation in the application is where it varies, not the concepts.

I saw this one a while back, not sure about how good it is:
http://www.riggingdojo.com/

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

[jahirul amin]

Hi Sandy

I have just finished the Judd Simantov course. It was very Maya centric but all the techniques and theory  can be easily transferred over to XSI and the weekly feedback was very useful. No fancy plugins used - just out of the box stuff mainly using joints and corrective shapes. All very good stuff and I would easily recommend the course.

This was my final outcome after the 8 weeks - still needs some cleanup.

http://vimeo.com/jahirulamin/facialromtest

Thanks

J

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From: Sandy Sutherland <Sandy.Su...@triggerfish.co.za>
To: "soft...@listproc.autodesk.com" <soft...@listproc.autodesk.com>
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 9:09 AM
Subject: Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Sandy Sutherland]

Awesome - thanks Jahirul and Eric - will get her onto that course by Judd - I do know he is a very good rigger, so if she can get techniques out if it, it will be worthwhile.

Cheers

Sandy

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of jahirul amin [aminj...@yahoo.com]
Sent: 20 June 2012 10:29
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Mirko Jankovic]

Check out rigging part in http://animschool.com/Catalog/ProgramDescription.aspx?ID=1

That one looks like something I wuold love to enroll as well, and their malcolm rig is pretty good.

[David Gallagher]

Hi Sandy!

We are about to start our Advanced Rigging course (facial rigging), taught by Chris Pagoria from Blue Sky Studios. He does many of the lead character facial rigs on Blue Sky's movies. Chris is VERY good. If you want to learn facial aesthetics, I highly recommend his class.
An old reel: http://chrispagoria.wordpress.com/demo-reel/

Even though Chris is Maya-based, our example rigs are XSI. I use XSI for all our AnimSchool rigs. I was the Character Development Supervisor at Blue Sky and I meet with the Character students in open review sessions each week. So there is some Softimage support here.
We like to think of ourselves as facial experts  :)
http://www.animschool.com/
http://www.animschool.com/DownloadOffer.aspx

Thanks!
Dave G

[Alan Fregtman]

Hi Sandy,

I agree with Eric. It's really a mixed bag without having word of
mouth from people you trust... I too took Raff's course and found it
fantastic, but I also took a certain Maya rigging one -- not the Judd
one -- only knowing his credentials were good, but it turned out quite
terribly produced. :/ (I don't wanna name names.)

The teacher in this case clearly knew a lot, was a nice guy and had
lots of experience, but as a teacher he'd seriously drag on and make
mistakes in his very elongated videos that he would not edit out; I
don't know if due to lack of time on a busy schedule, lack of editing
software, or just lazyness. Either way, you'd waste half an hour doing
some setup to find out in the last 3 or 4 minutes that he missed a key
part and then backtracked to fix it. Sometimes like 10 minutes went by
before he completely throw away the approach he was doing. If you were
to skip through his two hour video, even just by minute increments,
you could very easily miss a crucial backtracking moment, and then
your setup didn't match his.

The Rigging Dojo videos look good, though I've never taken a course
there myself so who knows. That said, their teachers seem to really
love their field, which is a good sign. David Gallagher's AnimSchool
looks great too.

In another topic, how's her vector math? You can do quite a bit of
rigging without knowing any, but if you know a little bit it can help
a ton to slowly master doing some nifty deformers in ICE and so on. --
Khan Academy has some good general videos on linear algebra concepts:
http://www.khanacademy.org/math/linear-algebra
and CMIvfx has these good ICE ones:
http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/418/Softimage+ICE+Deformers
http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/197/Softimage+ICE+For+A+Production+Pipeline
http://www.cmivfx.com/tutorials/view/212/Softimage+ICE%3A+Scalar+Data
and this one I recently heard of, not watched, but it's probably good
cause Mr.Vernon makes awesome things:
http://www.cgcircuit.com/lessondetailcomplete.php?val=599

Cheers,

-- Alan

[Sandy Sutherland]

Thanks Alan,

Will check out all of this stuff. She has been doing quite a lot of ICE stuff for facial setups such as sliding and eyelids - so she does have an understanding of it all.

I get you about that dodgy course you speak of - that is exactly why I asked on here, as I was pretty sure that you super knowledgeable guys would know of the best courses.

Cheers

Sandy

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

_______________________________________
From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Alan Fregtman [alan.f...@gmail.com]
Sent: 20 June 2012 15:43
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Guillaume Laforge]

Rigging is very similar to programming. Courses are very important of course, but you will learn much more efficiently by spending more time on doing your own rigs (and animating them) than reading too many books ;).

Just my personal morning feeling :).

Cheers,

Guillaume

[Miquel Campos]

Yep, I agree with Guillaume. +1



+++++++++++++++++
Miquel Campos
Character & Animation TD at:
www.shedmtl.com

Personal web:
www.akaosaru.com
+++++++++++++++++

2012/6/20 Guillaume Laforge <guillaume....@gmail.com>

[Eric Thivierge]

You learn a lot in production working on things and improving your own work, but also working with / around others with different approaches allows for filling your rigging toolbox too. Working with different riggers and animators helps you learn what different people like in rigs and can come up with solutions for different projects a lot more rapidly.

My terribly late night feeling. ;)

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

[Eric Thivierge]

My point above was that taking a course could give you a different perspective you may not have thought of and also someone to bounce ideas off of that you may not necessarily have at smaller studios.

[Sandy Sutherland]

I agree - it is easy to get stuck into a particular methodology, especially since we are stuck out of the mainstream here - beaches are great though, the the mountain - well........

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Eric Thivierge [ethiv...@gmail.com]
Sent: 20 June 2012 16:15

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Peter Agg]

"Courses are very important of course, but you will learn much more efficiently by spending more time on doing your own rigs (and animating them) than reading too many books"

You learn even more by giving them to animators to break them in ways you never imagined. :)

[Sandy Sutherland]

Lol - we have finished one movie - and now finished rigging for the second - so quite a lot of practice has been done, and a lot of animator testing too.

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Peter Agg [pete...@googlemail.com]
Sent: 20 June 2012 16:59

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Michal Doniec]

I can highly recommend Jason's Schlefier "Animato Friendly Rigging"
video. It's really good material and talks about concepts more than
how to click the buttons. It's Maya based and old, but still very
valid in my opinions and I consider it a classic.
I re-watch it every year or so, just to set myself straight.

--
----------
Michal
http://uk.linkedin.com/in/mdoniec

[Alan Fregtman]

* Another tip:
Even though scripting small repetitive tasks is not a bad idea, if you're new'ish to rigging, stay away from "making the ultimate auto-rigger script", because chances are your methods will evolve with practice, your script will thus soon be outdated and if you use the script to make the -same- setup -every time- you may not find yourself looking at ways to do things differently, and in my opinion you'll never innovate if you work the same way forever.

[Bradley Gabe]

+1!!!

[Michal Doniec]

Second that, generic auto rigging scripts often yield generic results.
Of course for some productions consistency and ability to chuck out
tons of generic rigs is important.

[Eric Thivierge]

Well, generic rigs also allow you get your bases covered to spend more time with the more intricate / advanced character setups that can run on top of them. Granted if you're building tools for auto-rigging you'll want to design them to be as versatile as possible.

--------------------------------------------
Eric Thivierge
http://www.ethivierge.com

[Bradley Gabe]

I like to think of rigging as a 3-phase process, with the generic, resizeable rig evolved and tuned to perform for phase-1.

Phase-1 is getting your joints placed, defining your volume, and sorting out coordinate space and rotation orders:

• Joint Placement :
  
• I use a technique where I create a temporary deformer where the static kinematic state is linked to the parent. This way, you can rotate the deformer, then shift the parent around and find where the sweet spot of deformation is with real time feedback.
• Have tools that help you with this process, but at a more atomic level.
  
• I used to have scripts that would generate hand rigs from curves, but there was so much variability with fingers from one character to the next, and then variability with animator control preference, it wasn't saving me any time. I was spending more time with weight painting fingers and interactive joint placement anyway.
  
• At this point, I have tools that allow me to generate chains from curves, but more importantly tools that generate guide curves from existing chains. The tools are focused on allowing maximum rigging flexibility, but more importantly on speeding up the bottlenecks during deformation tuning.
  
• Defining Volume:
  
• Assume you are going to be using GATOR to transfer your envelope onto other meshes.
  
• If you are lucky enough to have friendly modelers, they might do you the favor of always delivering a full, low res, unibody cage.
• Often, you'll instead get a character mesh that's made of pieces of garments, a section of undershirt, the lower segment of the arms, a neck that ends under the collar, etc.
  
• If you want to have any hope of using the envelope painting and smoothing functionality while keeping all the disconnected garments from crashing with the body parts you'll need to create a volume mesh for weight painting and transferring.
• If you are having trouble getting areas of your character to deform properly, try drawing profile curves and experimenting with them. It takes far less time to mess around with the weighting of a few vertex points, and if you can't get a simple, 2D profile curve to deform the way you want with your current rig setup, there's no way you'll get a much higher res, 3D mesh to do it.
  
• Sorting out coordinate space and rotation order:
• Extremely important, but often overlooked, even by more experienced riggers.
• Too many people think that the zero space for animation is defined by the envelope rest pose, but there is no reason at all for this.
  
• Rather, all animation controls should be set based on the most ideal rotational space to avoid gimbal lock in typical performance situations. (Example: Use ZXY for the central body controls. With XYZ, you hit gimbal lock the moment your character turns 90 degrees in world space, which happens all the time!)
• Rotation order should be thought about for each animation control, but it also should not be set in stone. Different scenes might call for different settings, and your pipeline should allow for this.
  
• Make sure your numerical values for animation controls and fcurves make intuitive sense and have some kind of obvious alignment with world space, because you never know what production is going to throw at you. (Example: I've seen rigs where the feet are angled apart in the rest pose, and zeroing out the feet animation controls returns to the angled pose. The problem is, when moving the feet forward in their local space, they spread further and further apart. This was making it really tough on animators who were trying to work out walk and run cycles, since the characters would end up doing the splits the further they cycled through world space.)
• Because of this, my Envelope Binding Pose is never the same as my Animation Rest Pose
• Envelope Binding Pose - The rest pose of the mesh as delivered. This Pose establishes the foundation for your volume deformations (If it's a T-Pose, you might need to have a serious chat with your modelers).
  
• Animation Rest Pose - Where all your animation controls go when you zero out the rotations and positions. A well thought out Animation Rest Pose will almost always make for a lousy Envelope Binding Pose.
• Use the Mixer to store your Binding Pose and your Animation Rest Pose, and keep them with every instance of your Model.
• It's in this area I see most auto rigging setups fail. They provide guide tools that allow the rigger to match exactly to the Envelope Bind Pose, but they don't allow access to control over the Animation Rest Pose.
  

Getting through Phase-1, with practice, should rarely take more than a production day, and in many cases, only a couple of hours. For some simple 1-off characters, you might not even need more phases.

The main purpose for phase-1 is to hand off the rig as quickly as possible to your animators so they can start trying to break it and block it into scenes. At this point, you should also start getting feedback and be prepared to make repairs and adjustments. You will also want to use their performances and advice for feeding into phase-2.

Phase-2 Adding secondary deformation effects

• corrective shapes
• face shapes
• flesh jiggle
• skin sim
• muscle
• etc

This is, in my opinion, the more creative area of the rigging process, and where it's been so interesting to have the power of ICE these past few years. The Non-Linear nature of XSI makes it possible to allow your animators to work with the phase-1 rig while you continue on to phase-2.

Phase-2 rigging is also the reason a rigger need not fear the existence of auto-rigging setups, since, (as Eric T. suggested) their main purpose is to get through phase-1 as quickly as possible.

Phase-3 Complex secondary rigs. Hybridized components that ride on top of the character mesh and require direct animation control, often combined with simulation.

• Simulated cloth and hair
• Character animated accessories (bags, straps, chains, jewelry)
  
• Character animated cloth and hair components (whiskers, brows, facial hair)
  

• High level of difficulty - Animating interaction with straps, ropes, chains, that have fixed length but also require sim.
  
• They often require constraining nulls to polygon clusters, which are then used as roots for additional rig setups. If their animation controls are visible, it forces full evaluation of the underlying rig.
• Thus, they tend to result in slower performance because they rely on the finished evaluation of the phase-1 and phase-2 deformations.
• Example: a character wears a satchel on a shoulder strap. Portions of the strap must be bound to the shoulder and chest geometry of the character, which themselves are being deformed. If you are running phase-2 shapes and jiggle sims on the body, then the satchel strap deformation must also ride on these results.
• They introduce annoying complexity into a pipeline, since they might force multiple layers of caching, which create a stack of dependencies to deal with for every revision. 
• They happen towards the end of your rigging schedule, when you might already be tired from finishing phase-1 and phase-2
  
• Your producer probably did not consider their impact on setup times and shot production.
• Your animators are wondering how a rig that was performing nicely in real time (during phase-1) is now chugging along (at phase-3) when all they want to do is animate the whiskers
• Have an arsenal of custom, atomic-level tools available for quickly handling phase-3 setups:
• Naming tools that deal with sequences and series of controls so that you can use the resulting naming conventions to feed into other tools and workflows.
• Creating and constraining nulls to selected components
• Creating control curves and meshes from selected components
• Setting constraints by proximity to curves and meshes
• Tools that allow you to transform scene objects using deformations:
• Transform from envelope
• Transform from lattice
• etc...
• Tools that build control setups for straps, chains, ropes

I have a nice arsenal of atomic level tools now for dealing with phase-1 and phase-3, developed from almost 20 years of rigging experience. I might need to start thinking about packaging and selling them soon if there is enough interest in the community.

-Bradley

[tak...@earthlink.net]

Great stuff, Brad!

Thanks for sharing - really clean and clear.

-T

-----Original Message-----
From: Bradley Gabe
Sent: Jun 21, 2012 11:53 AM
To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Michal Doniec]

Thanks a lot Brad, great sanity check list!

[Eric Thivierge]

That post is worth its bit count in gold!

Very awesome post Brad thanks so much!

[Simon Anderson]

Awesome read, Brads write is is really epic.

Sandy any luck finding a course? are you thinking more programming or rigging?

--
-------------------
Simon Ben Anderson
blog: http://vinyldevelopment.wordpress.com/

[Sandy Sutherland]

Hi Si,

Yes we decided on something - it is for Pearl to do.  And yes there were some awesome courses raised here - thanks again to all who replied.

S.

_____________________________
Sandy Sutherland
Technical Supervisor
sandy.su...@triggerfish.co.za
_____________________________

---

From: softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com [softimag...@listproc.autodesk.com] on behalf of Simon Anderson [simonbenan...@gmail.com]
Sent: 22 June 2012 01:50

To: soft...@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Re: Rigging or Character TD type courses question

[Simon Anderson]

Awesome, yeah thought it was for pearl :)

[Morten Bartholdy]

That is one full bag of gold nuggets Brad - thanks for the insight and thorough walkthrough!

 

best

Morten Bartholdy