Rigging reel

[rigwrxxs]

woot a fellow maya rigger. Overall I think it looks good and i can see it's got everything there that they need to see. I'm currently working on my own demo reel as well. Things that I have been told to leave out are just as you say, no repeating things etc.

I would get rid of that whole section where you repeat the animation and give credits. If you are concerned with them not being able to see the deformation on the animations, just turn the controls off, as they have already seen what the controls look like from when you screen captured your rigs. This reel is for you to show your work and you're not really trying to get you, and your friends a job. If the situation calls for it, say you needed permission to even use their models, I would add a page near the end for a few seconds that just gives special thanks to so and so, but repeating something they had already seen, ive heard it’s a big no no.

The rendering in the beginning looks very clean and is taking a good approach where you have your render, and then your curves show up. May I ask what method you used to render your curves? They look really good and I’m struggling with getting mine to do the same thing.

There’s also a shot where you zoom into a close-up on one of your character's backs. I think this is really good deformation, and it would be to your benefit to show a wireframe of the deformation, then they can really get a good feel of how that part is deforming. Ive used a method where you can layer your wireframe over your high res so they can see how the lines are moving. If you need a tutorial on how to render wireframes too, let me know.

in fact you should probably check out a few rigging demo reels for some inspiration, hehe mine is nothing great to look at, it needs a bit of editing work and i'm changing it a bunch for my next draft, but ive gotten my inspiration from most of these artists some of which graduated from my college, check them out.

http://www.brianpaik3d.com/home.html
http://shrtcww.com/
http://www.kyle3d.com/
http://www.ikfk.com/

[lifire]

Thanks for the reply. I'm guessing you graduated from Full Sail? Malcolm at Blur has been a big inspiration for me as well. Heard his name in character rigging and never stopped hearing it.

I will probably take the animations out at the end with the credits. It's all about toying with ideas though. As for the curves displaying on top of the animation, I've gotten mixed feedback. I've been told it's a good thing because it allows you to see how the controls work in motion and to view the rig as a puppet. On the other hand, it hides the animation/deformation. I've also heard some saying to put just the controls in a corner (smaller) and leave the animation alone, but that seems cluttered and the attention is split - no good.

So, I want to hear more opinions about the controls over the animation, please. Do you like it? Does it help? Take them out?

As for getting the controls to look nice... just do a playblast at twice the size of the renders. Alt+b to change background to black, then select -hi main rig node to get the controls to look white. Make sure you have the camera resolution gate showing. Take it into shake and use a crop node, resize to render, then reorder rgbr for alpha, then just over node. If you don't have access to shake, I would probably just use some form of paint effects for the curves and actually render them out. You can use the same thing for the wireframes.

I think I like the idea of adding a wireframe to that deformation too. I'll give that a shot and see how it looks.

Thanks.

[rigwrxxs]

cool, I see how people would have mixed reviews for layering your controllers. You can try to experiment with the paint effect curves over your model, then render a separate pass with just the high res and blend it in a compositing program, I like this method so that you don’t see the back facing of the curves, it adds way less clutter and they can essentially see more of the deformation, do camera turns, and overall there’s less confusion of what controller is controlling what. I’ve also colored my paint effect controllers so they are even easier to tell apart.

I’m actually graduating from AISF, up here in nor cal but Malcolm’s site I guess is pretty well known everywhere heh, we all used his demo reel as a good reference for demo reels here at school.

[lifire]

My bad. It's just I saw two Full Sail alumni there so... but I see under your name now.

I was originally thinking of hiding the curves with the character's alpha channel. Good to hear someone agree though.

Thanks again.

[lifire]

Reel has been updated, feel free to take a look and comment.

Thanks.

http://rhodes3dsetup.com/resources/videos/demo_Lo.mov (~18mb)

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