Rigging Process
What is Rigging?
One of the most important parts of the animation pipeline is the rigging process. This process is important because without it the characters in our film would not be able to move. The models that the modelers give us are static. This is a problem because the animators need to be able to move our characters around and bring them to life. This is where rigging comes in. During the rigging process we tell Maya where we want the character's joints to be and we tell those joints what areas we would like them to affect by a process called weight painting. Weight painting is exactly what it sounds like. We select a joint and then paint the influences on the character. This is great and all but we don't want the animators to accidentally break something when they move the joints around. This is why we give them controllers to work with. That way they are unable to mess with the bone structure and they are able to animate multiple controls at once.
Old Melody Rig:
When we first started working on our short we wanted to make our short feel a bit more unique than the shorts that preceded it. Most of the shorts that have come out of the Digital Animation Center had rigs that were made with a tool called Advanced Skeleton. Our lead rigger Timothy Wielgus thought it would be a cool idea if we built our rigs from scratch without using any 3rd party tools. So he and Isa Watson set out to make their own custom rigs. This proved to be a very challenging process so we unlisted the help of Naasir Neeley. While Isa worked on the custom rig for the giraffe Tim and Naasir decided to work the Melody rig together. It was decided that Tim would handle working on the blend-shapes and controls on the face, while Naasir would work on the main joints and controls for the character. Once Naasir finished the body Tim started to work on the face. However, this is where problems started to occur. One of the main problems that no one could have predicted was the blend-shapes on Melody's face would constantly break for unknown reasons. Another mistake that we made was that we had the riggers and texture artists working on the model at the same time. This meant that when the UV's were applied to the rigged version it caused the weights to be completely remapped to different locations on the character. Because of this we realized how important it was to streamline our pipeline and after this we made sure that the UV's were completed before the models were sent off to be rigged.
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It is worth noting that all of these issues did get resolved. Tim was eventually able to get the facial blend-shapes to work properly and we were able to work around the weight-paints issue by putting the new UV's onto a new model and then copying the weights over using a tool called NGskintools. While we did want to continue making the custom Melody rig it was already November by the time these issues were resolved. And because our deadline to start animating was coming up we had to scrap the custom melody rig and make an Advanced Skeleton rig instead.
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There is a light at the end of the tunnel in this story though. While the custom Melody rig was never completed Isa managed to finish her custom giraffe rig and use it in the final film. One really important lesson that we learned throughout this experience is that there is no such thing as failure. While we were not able to accomplish what we wanted this experience taught us a lot of valuable lessons about rigging and the production pipeline as a whole. It taught us that it was really important to try and make sure things worked the way they should early on so that we could solve issues that arose and not have to worry about them later. If it were not for us discovering that the weight paints were mapped to the UV's we might have continued to rig many more characters without realizing our mistake. So while the custom rig was a scrapped it potentially saved us hundreds of hours of work.
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Advanced Skeleton Rigs:
Most of our characters were rigged using a tool called Advanced Skeleton. This tool really helped us get our character rigs done in a timely fashion. It made the rigging process a lot faster and we were able to make each character rig in only a few short days.
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Challenges:
One of the biggest challenges we had to face was importing our characters into Unreal Engine Five. Unreal can be quite a picky program and it was very tricky to get the character meshes to import correctly. Melody's mesh would break constantly and we would often have to send it back to Tim Wielgus to see if he could fix it. After many tests and completely re-building Melody's rig from the ground up we discovered that the blend-shapes were what was causing the Mesh to deform weirdly. Once we got rid of the blendshapes the rig imported fine. We also had some trouble with the other character rigs as well. Sometimes the mesh would break or the mesh did not want to import at all. Usually re-skinning the character fixed the issue. Another challenged we faced was rigging the props. Because we decided to use Unreal each of our props had to be rigged. Normally we would have just attached a few simple controls and left it at that. However Unreal requires our rigs to have an UnrealRoot Joint. Without that joint Unreal will not be able to keep track of an object's position in the scene space. This meant that we had to use Advanced Skeleton to Rig our props. This was challenging because Advanced Skeleton was not designed to rig props. This meant that we had to experiment with each rig until we found a joint system and skinning method that worked.