Hi guys, well i have done some of feature film type rigs for learning stuff, so those rigs are dual skeleton rigs (deformation and control) facial bone rig and some cool stuff for those kind of rigs.
Now i want to learn about the game industry rigging and i would like to know what differences exists between those two pipelines and workflows.
Thanks in advance, the software used is Maya.
Hi,
I might be not the right person to explain this in depth (ist my lay/laic opinion) but based on what I know I think the basic difference is of course in deatilness and usage.
I mean, game character is tend to be controled by a player in the game and is generally less complicated and doesnt include detailed things like muscle deformation or skin gliding, which feature film rig does (as you mentioned, there might be two separated rigs - deformation and skeleton). All those features are being reflected in rig structure and its controls and in a game character rig they are needed to be made another way understandable by current game engine (dont ask me how :D).
To give an exaple, imagine a CGI character in a feature film - it has its body rigged with all details (skin deformation, muscles… and it has many many additional controls to make animators life easier), but clothes on him are done by simulation to achieve realistic results, and they are not probably a part of the rig. Now, imagine the same character to be used in a game: rig needs to include also his clothes behavior and all stuff around the character, because in the final result, when player i.e. holds up arrow to make character sprint, rig has to handle it all together.
Some time ago, I had an idea to create a soldier character for UDK but it all failed exactly on rig and stuff around. Now Im going to create a simple primitive character rig but not for game, just for animation and I will see if I can make it 
Hope I helped at least a little bit 
Beyond the differences in amount of detail being rigged, game characters usually have a limited set of motions. The character is going to walk, run slow, run fast, and change direction, for example. A film character has to move realistically, which means a much larger set of motions.
A film character might require several different rigs, one for each activity, each of which has a high amount of detail in the area of activity but maybe not anywhere else. Sitting and having a conversation would require a lot of facial rig detail, where a complicated fight sequence has to have good shoulder and hip detail but not so much in the lips and cheeks. A game character might need only one or maybe two rigs for all actions.
If you’re learned rigging for films, you’re in good shape to just dumb it down a little for games. It would be harder to go in the other direction.
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