3D Character Rigging
In case ya'll didn't know I go to school at the Art Institute of California Hollywood. My major is Game Art and Design. I'm pretty much taking classes to land a job in the game industry and help to create video games. A lot of things go into making a game. Creating the story, characters, levels, assets, etc. A lot of things from many art fields are dragged in writing, cinematography, fashion design, interior design, and the list goes on and on.
But one of the fields of game design for which i've been busy mainly is 3D Character Rigging. Essentially drawing a skeleton for the character you've designed giving you the ability to move and animate the character's mesh.
I took a couple of screenshots showing some of it. Hopefully it gives some people an insight into what these things are.
Here We Go
So this is the character that was provided in class (since its not a character design class, we're mainly focused on rigging) Anyway the gray clay like thing is the mesh we're going to animate, the character. The blue chain of lines are the bones we've drawn in there. the shapes around the character are the curves we've set in place to drive the bones since we don't want to animate bones directly we put these curves in place.
Here is the chain of bones selected so you can get a better view of it
Since we haven't skinned this to the mesh yet when we animate the bones they move individually from the character.
Here we are moving the spine around a bit without the mesh skinned
So now we skin it (assuming we're done rigging the entire character) Select the mesh and the entire skeleton then click on the skin drop down menu and select smooth bind.
Here's the smooth bind opened. We change a few settings and hit apply.
Notice the bones changed colors
Now with the character binded we can do stuff like this!
And this!
And doing walk cycles...!?
Well this isnt the only class I have but its one of the harder ones. Wait character riggers get paid more?! Sign me up Mister Jackson!
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