Creature Rigging for Production

Character rigging is a process that starts the moment the design of a character is established. To get the most out of a character it involves a lot of communication between the modeler, the rigger and, whenever possible, the animator. This tutorial begins by working with the basic blockout ZBrush file from Ben Erdt’s tutorial “Creature Modeling for Production” to start generating the skeleton. The rig is set up in several components, divided by the limbs, and aims to create a fully functional body rig before the modeler is done creating a clean topology. The components make use of IK, FK and Spline-IK systems with blending where necessary. Some python code is shared to speed up some of these workflows. Tools that are not part of the original Maya tool-set will be used to create controls and help out with skinning the basic blockout mesh. This will then become the base information used in the final mesh, where a second phase of rigging starts: adding the extra detail controls on the character. The end-result contains a rig that is easy to use for an animator and which can be directly used in a game engine.