Hey everyone!
I want to know the difference between rigging for video games and film. I’m currently learning to rig characters so I want to know if I have to learn each differently and/or the software used to rig for games and film.
Also, let’s say I am a rigger for the video game industry, can I switch to a film studio for rigging?
I only know Maya for now.
Thanks in Advance 
Rigging for film-especially VFX- is going to be way more complex and task specific than games. The goal is not real-time performance and generic plug-and-play between characters and actions. But solving complex issues that maybe only a few shots require. And rigging is a bit different still for feature animation where its more complex than a games rig-but the same character may appear over and over in hundreds of shots and may require a certain look and feel. A physical personality if you will. Since I am not a rigger but I found a useful paper which gives you some real perspective on all the variations. So check this out.
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.474.9719&rep=rep1&type=pdf
Take a look at the god of war rigs and you see they are getting closer to film rigs. With the new consoles next year the lines will blend even more.
Here at 25min
Feature film rigs are goin in that direction. Simmulated muscles snd fat. Nothing one could do without special tools.
I think a good explanation came from a presentation on quaternion skinning for crysis years back at siggraph. It was part of a group of presentations i went to see, and in it the presenter brought up some slides discussing storage of data in bits, and timing comparisons of miliseconds and i could see how vastly different that was from feature rigs where 24fps was a fast rig
I just skimmed through it and I really loved the topics. I will read it once I am free. Thanks for this! It may answer my questions fully
There’s a difference between rigging by yourself or by a skilled team for AAA titles, be it games or movies.
For you personally, most probably for lowpoly game models you would use fewer bones for joints (no additional bone for a knee\elbow, or each knuckle for a better deformation), simpler general rigging for lowpoly models (no soft body simulation, no clothes simulation, no hair simulation). You would stick with blendshapes for facial animation, rather than bones facial approach.
So in a nutshell, for lowpoly models fewer bones, no complex sims, no muscle or tissue simulation. Just direct deformation.
For precision -particularly for VFX you might be rigging for context moreso than anywhere else.
Say in a monster film some poor helpless back ground character basically has to get torn-in-half.
And this is their only appearrance. Its just an ‘eww!’ moment.
You and animation might be going back and forth while together you get this one shot approved by the client (and they have the last word).
In this case you might be helping animation do the ‘tear’ -the ‘thing’ doing the tearing as well as the regular body kinematics of the character. You also might be working with or much closer to raw scan data. The more one-off a character shot might be the less amount of time other departments might spend ‘bullet proofing’ the assets for you. Therefor more things for you to workaround.
Games likely never work like that.
So basically FILM= more complex rigging and harder and GAMES= less complex and easier rigging?
Depends.
Film might be very ‘complex’-but maybe messy too. But- It might only have to work for one shot only.
Games -the rig has to work as perfectly as possible no matter what the player has the character do.
Maybe needs to be ‘simpler’ but also much more ‘bullet-proof’ and anticipate the unexpected.
Check all the angles and focus on what you think you might like to do.
Sorry it wasnt my intention to suggest in anyway that one was easier than the other.
In general both have their unique challenges not just in rigging but in anything. Rigging, animation, ligbting, fx. For VFX studios doing film the bar keep rising and rigs get so complex that sometimes multiple characters in a single scene can’t perform interactively, simulations take tens of hours and render take days to get back. As the tools and computers get faster, the bar for quality just goes up and up.
Videos games have a different challenge. They can’t achieve the same (yet) but they can get close and the expectation is always to match what is possible but in realtime. It take a whole different approach and mindset to create something that can look somewhat similar but realtime in stead of thousands of core hours
Both are challenging but the goals and challenges are different.
