Hey Chris. I am freelancing mostly for small/medium sized commercial houses over here and currently I am in the process of implementing some of those concepts for my own enjoyment and speeding up my work. I usually find myself in a situation when I have to rig a character quick. Most of characters I work on have arms and legs, and are symmetrical, so having a script which will build an arm and symmetrized it using common naming conventions saves me a lot of time. I also color code my rigs (left side blue, right red etc) use boxes as shadow bones for arms, cylinders for hands etc.. small things but speed up animation a bit when added. Not to mention I am always sure about names and groups etc… in fast production it gives me more time to animate later and of course I can reuse my animations if I want.

I have idea for reusable simplified face rig as well, one would have to model some common, predefined shapes and the script would do the rest, but it’’s long way… need to learn a lot to be able to do it.

Of course most important thing is that I learn scripting a bit doing it :)

this approach of creating a rig by using script functions rather than just “clicking it together” is the only way (I could think of or have experiences so far) to have rigs for a big production (like a full animated feature movie). Only this way a team of many people rather then just one person can work and modify on many complex rigs. I know that the beginning can be a pain in the butt with this approach but this way you can modify everything at any time and everybody in the team can do it (try that with a “clicked together” rig!).

I am very happy to see that the XSI comunity is heading this way now and I love the tools (scripting) XSI provides us with. Unfortunately we do not use XSI here but I can tell you this much: our pipeline (proprietary) has always been this way, more scripting then clicking, and it proved to be very efficient.

In a way you are doing riging on a higher level. Rather than always starting from scratch you are inheriting functionality from more basic “body parts” or classes and you can develop very powerfull modules for rigs.

Guido

I”m interested in getting an XSI version up and running too as one of our main animators here prefers XSI to animate in – I”ve got an exporter written for max that can pull out fcurve data for objects to text files so I”m working on getting a standardised rig setup that operates the same in max and XSI and can export it’’s animation lceanly between the two (I dont want to do an fbx key on all frames type style)

I”d be very interested in how the interface is designed in XSI as the version I”m doing now is really off the top of my head rather than experience from a big facility.

I”m with Guy on this one, a node graph would really help.
A node graph of classes returns to rig assembly some of the interactivity we experience when creating the rigs in the app thru the gui interface.

I”d be curious what some people’’s thoughts are on implementing this kind of pipeline in a small commercial house. Again I can see the benefits no question. But in a situation where one week your animating a cereal box, the next week a talking wallet, then a 4 legged character. Every job being done by different artists, some freelance, and more often then not by someone with no scripting skills. Is it worth the time invested, and the babysitting of artists to properly name things, when it’’s just a one person job that’’s gonna take 3 weeks, and the files will most likely never be opened again? Coming from a small shop, where some people tend to be lazier then others, it would be difficult to implement. Just playing Devil’’s addvocate.

To answer Michal D’’s question. It’’s as simple (more laborious then simple on the scripting side) as using nulls for positioning. So a null that is representative of each joint and in cases of legs arms nulls for up vectors. Each of the nulls is representative of where a joint starts and ends.

Do you mind if I ask how do you drive all of this? Do you have some sort of template/guide rig then generate real one based on guides?

anyone would think you were working on an fx tree!?

grin

_sam

I also understand the XSI has a XML parser as well which makes the software 100x’’s more powerful. being able to create a unique scripting invironment is critical to realtime and runtime production and development. I hope that many take advantage of this modular content development framework that Softimage included in the latest release of XSI.

-Shorty

Ciao Guy, are you working on something like that? ; ) … I”ve seen somewhere a python visual editor working in such a way…I can”t remember where…

At the moment I”m very happy with this worflow:
Visual studio
A character is defined inside an XSI plugin, the new plug-in system is perfect for managing characters
and JScript as main language.
I”m just missing an include statement and probably this will force me to move on python…I”ve got serious problems with its syntax, Patrick, don”t get mad at me :D

Really Looking forward to have DotNet\Mono APIs…