For those of you into 3D character animation using Autodesk Maya, Lynda.com has just introduced a new rigging course by George Maestri, writer and producer of numerous animated TV shows, such as 'South Park' and 'Rocko's Modern Life'.
After you've completed modeling and texturing your CG character, before you can start rendering out those awesome animations, your model has to be rigged, meaning you have to add various controls to it, enabling you to manipulate it any which way you want, which you've of course planned ahead carefully in your storyboards.
Your model maybe a character, a car or any other piece of geometry that has been specifically designed to move in a certain way, according to it's anatomic build. Maya comes with a complete set of tools, enabling you to create bones and set up a skeletal construct that can be skinned or bound to the character. Using Forward and Inverse Kinematics, you are the able to drive the rig, thus moving your character. This is, in essence, what rigging is about. Rigs can be created as simple or as complicated as needed and although you can go through each fase of the process yourself, as you create your own animations from scratch, in a professional studio environment, the rigging proces is mostly done by a professional rigger, as it's a process that can become a challenging task quickly.
A rig can also be linked to a bones system derived from motion capture data, and in fact have your digital character move in all sorts of ways, as you've previously recorded in a studio using human actors, eliminating the animation process for the large part. However, as the word 'animation' stems from the latin 'Animare' (meaning 'to breathe life into'), the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, changed the rules of the game this year, in an attempt to keep the medium pure. Animated feature films that are created using Motion Capture data are now excluded from the Academy Award for Animated Feature Film, leaving Spielberg's 'The adventures of Tintin: The secret of the Unicorn' as the first without a nomination. So hey, if you're planning on winning an Oscar, do it 'oldschool'!
Maestri goes through the entire process of setting up a proper rig and explaing all FK and IK constraints, providing a basic model. His enthusiasm will surely get you all excited and ready to jump in there right with him to tackle some of the exercises Lynda has provided along with the video's.
Yes, Linda exists for real, she's not just a funny cartoony logo! Working with William Shatner, she was the first to use 3D computer software to previsualize a scene for a major motion picture in 1988 working on Start Trek V: The Final Frontier' (Shatner also directed). She also worked as an FX animator on 'Bill & Ted's excellent Adventure' and on Irvin Kershner's final film 'Robocop II' (Kershner also directed 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back' for Lucas in 1980). Together with her husband Bruce Heavin she founded the online training site Lynda.com in 1995 in Ojai, California. It currently employs more then 200 staffmembers and 140 teachers with clients such as Disney, Google, Adobe and academic clients including Yale and Princeton University and MIT.
FK/IK and Set-driven Keys.
While Foward Kinematics provides the basic movements you would expect from a naturally working construct, using various joints to complete a task or goal, it can become a tedious task as it operates in a kind of trial and error workflow. Using Inverse Kinematics, you're able to set the goal beforehand and link the character to it, making sure it moves and rotates specifically to complete the task that was set up. Although The first method creates more smoothly and rounded movements, the second proves of course extremely timesaving, both have their place and you should of course set up your rigs so they can switch between one and the other at will. The video's George provides in this course show you how everything is setup. Using some math and expressions, he also shows you how to build a custom interface and various controls to visually take charge of your character without actually having to dive into the rig itself. Maya uses MEL or Maya Embeded Language, which is based on the scripting language from Wavefront's Dynamation (one of the three earlier 3D graphics programs that continued together as Maya).
Above left: Maestri regularly contributes as a writer to 'Computer Graphics World' magazine. This month's issue features articles on Disney's 'John Carter of Mars' and Naughty Dog's popular Playstation video game 'Uncharted: Drake's Revenge'. Right: The cover to Maestri's latest book '3ds Max at a glance' published by Sybex/Wiley.
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