Typically, how long does it take you to rig a character?

#1

Rig
Skin
Add influences/muscles/deformers/blendshapes

How long would it take you to do this for a simple character, a more complicated character, and a complex character? (organic character) More for animation, not games. Just curious.

#2

I only do simple characters at the moment, for a full body and facial rig, maybe 1-2 days. But I sit down at a computer, start rigging, finish, then wake up like I was in a dream and suddenly it’s morning on the next day. So yeah, 1-2 days without really taking breaks. Probably unhealthy, oh well, I don’t want to end up old anyway!

I’m also very inexperienced. And my rigs aren’t that great.

#3

As the previous poster said, for a simple rig a couple of days can be enough. Most animation studios give about a week it seems per rig. If it’s for a feature it can be a lot longer, for commercials maybe shorter as you’d know exactly what’s needed… plus those guys get hammered on the schedule anyway. :wip:

#4

I have most of my tools automated for body elements, independant limbs, accessories and faces. So crafting a core rig is about 4 hours. Then a couple hours on a rough bind and then straight to animation. Once the character starts getting animated, I’ll adjust the bind accordingly. Since painting weights, combined with referencing, is fairly straight forward, I find it more important to see the character in motion before spending any large amount of time on finesing.

#5

Basic Human= a few hours
Medium Complexity= 2 days
Complex Rig=1week to a month(depending on so so many variables)

note: I am an all season generalist, so I am sure riggers have it down to a lot less.
I also like to reference my characters for multiple reasons, allowing me to update them as I proceed.

#6

Best advise you could ever give an animator right there. That way, if something breaks, it can be fixed without losing the animation.

#7

best advice is to just keep on rigging,
The more you do the faster you get.
Start with jason Schleifer’s Animation Friendly rig and just keep going on from there.

My colleague just rigged a firefly, a dragonfly and half a giant venus fly trap before lunch this morning. (he is a genius machine though)

#8

check this out…

Rig your characters in seconds…

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=88&t=990484

#9

One note that I need to say is that a great deal of rigging is utilizing scripted commands. These scripts/workflows can take a great deal of time, skill and talent to develop and refine. Eventually it allows you to create a first draft of a rig in a few hours. But if you are starting from scratch with a vanilla install of Maya and doing everything by hand, the process can take much longer.
Where I work, it is pretty standard to give a week for a character rig + a few days for a full facial rig, if needed. We have a lot of tools to streamline the process and all the major rigging is scripted…but time refining deformations and joint placement after a round of animation tests can make or break a character.
Technically, using scripted commands, I can rig a character in a few hours…but before that character sees final renders it gets a great deal more rigging time.

Just my two cents to try to fill in some blanks here

#10

simple characters = 2-3 hours…
medium characters = 1-1.5 days…
complex = never got the oppurtunity to rig

#11

well i think with a autoRig script it could be done pretty fast and most of the time will be used to paint weights unless there are auto skin scripts out there…which i wish i can has
and trouble shooting probly will take a few hours

#12

to be honest i have seen many artists to spend time and worrying about skinning. but i never had to go to that struggle so far. i basic technique is to get the basics of skinning right. and technically as i go, set the minimum range to -1 so that we can even remove weights in fractions from any portion of mesh. never use replace option.

#13

I think I might try the minimum range to -1 but I have to say…replace option is great because I don’t ever have to worry about the weight on any vert to be over 1 from multiple influence, maybe im doing it wrong but seems to work for me

#14

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