Glad to hear your growing. Your stuff is already TOPS. I give you props, you got 2 or 3 films in the can already. I got NARRY, NADA…NULL. least not yet.
What plug in beta? Am I missing somethng? I just try to sign up for Sonica.
Your turtle rig looked like it had FK/Ik switchers, that's why I asked. I'm still having a hard time justifying incorporating FKIK switchers even in Maya considering I can animate fine without them. BTW, those Porcupine animations were done in only a few hours. I did them inbetween renders. I had two weeks but I think I drew it out to 3 with the good grace of my client. :)
Yes, rigs are suppose to be "Fun" for the animator. That's a feature.
But there's "nice rigs and there's "DOWN and DIRTY rigging". I'm trying to figure out when does "Happy Rigs" come into play.
I mean, the Puma Robot was a big rig job. If I cut corner it would have been "Danger Will Robinson". The rig would have turned on it's master. Also, I had to pass it to other animators inorder to meet the deadline. One bad texture meant redoing 4 outsourced files. It had to be right. That's when ideas like "Publish and Subscribe" pop into my head as a production feature. If I forget a texture (or David, the renderer) I could "Publish" a new update to 3 other users "Subscribers" with the same file and only the texture update. The pipeline for that rig had to be well thought out or it would've meant back-tracking.
[http://www.puma.com/holiday/](http://www.puma.com/holiday/)
So I concluded there's different types of rigging based on timetables. Personal projects, long form film project, short term web and TV deadlines and lastly super-turbo (ok, that's not a catagory but it puts the dead in deadline) . The sweet rigs are "films" and what every RigTech wants, room for testing and some room to make rigs "Pretty". I think it's a rarity unless all you do is rig or use scripts.
I want to do a nice facial rig UI but more than likely I would opt out for just enough morphs to "sell" the performance. Either that or I would have to make sure my budget included a modeler, a texture painter, an effect guy, and renderer so the TD/rigTech can have time to do a decent rig (that would be me :).
I think pretty soon after few more studies, or projects, I'm going to move to auto-rigging. I think rigging is for custom characters. Once I understand the mechancs of the process, I don't see a real need to keep repeating it per character. Most projects only need 1 or 2 character but what if you need 10 or 20? It has to be gotta be automated.
