Object grouping before character rigging

#1

Hello, I’m somewhat new to character rigging and have only made basic joint rigs. I’m now attempting a fully functional character rig for a bipedal mouse that’s to be used for educational video animations. To save myself hours of watching tutorials I wanted to ask a few questions before getting started. As of now, each individual eye is grouped with its accompanying eye lid and eye lash meshes while the body and clothing meshes are all separated and ungrouped. Can someone tell me the optimal grouping for all the assets so that when I apply the rig it functions correctly?

Also, the mouse character will need to be able to speak and sing. I’ve been watching tutorials on how to use both blend shapes and joints to control the face, but the tutorial was only using a bust so I’m unsure if I need to separate the head from the rest of the body mesh to ensure the rig functions correctly.

In short, I guess I’m unsure of the correct hierarchy the meshes should follow in order for a complex bipedal rig to work correctly; a rig with facial controls too. I hope this makes sense. Maybe if someone could give me a general workflow of rigging for such a model that could be helpful as well.

Thank you!

#2

Hey Kaci,

it doesn’t matter how you group the meshes, groups help when you want to just see certain things, just the body perhaps or you dont want to see anything but the control rig, or maybe you just want to see the world geometry, that could be a group.

https://sites.google.com/site/mayariggingwiki/rigging-notes/facial-rigging/more-face-rigging-systems this has some nice face rigging stuff on it.

often times people like to have the head separated so that the bend shape just targets the face. I have always thought that this is to make the file smaller. you dont have to if you dont want to. just remember that if you move the foot in the blendshape, then your foot is going to move, but if you only move the face verts you should be good.

you can add as many geometries to a rig as you want to. I like to have a file structure to my rig, lets say mouse, then a geometry, control, joint, and I build the rest from there. you don’t have to separate out the control and joints, you could just do geo and rig. if sounds like it would be easiest to just do a simple rig for you and then do the face with blend shapes and animate those targets.

hopefully this helps

happy rigging!