For my design and research blog posts I chose to return to rigging. To start off what is rigging? Rigging is the process of creating a mechanism on how something should move. It is comparable to building a skeleton. This is also the reason why some of the used terms are joints and bones. As soon as one object moves or influences another it can be called rigging.
Rigging is a general term used for both 2D and 3D animation. It is the step between creating for example a character and the animation afterwards. In other words, it is the step most people would rather skip, as do I. However, since it is one of the steps that keeps me from creating my own animations with my own models I want to get better at it. I have some experience in rigging for 3D programs. In my bachelor’s I learned some basics in maya. The lessons were very quick and hard to follow along. I learned the most in my internship at a tiny indie game studio where I got to model, rig and animate a grey heron as well as a badger. The most complex rig was a crow I made for bachelor project. However, half of it was with an auto rigging tool. I still had to do a lot of manual corrections and that bird had so many feathers I had to rig one by one.
Still, I feel like there was never a very solid base of knowledge for the rig and I only applied what I needed now. This caused some problems later with the rigs and I had to redo a lot. I want to change that. This is why I searched for an extensive course on rigging. I found “The Art of Effective Rigging 2” by Pierrick Picaut on his Website p2design academy. I have watched some of his free content on Youtube bevor and figured it would be a great fit. The lessons are detailed, files for every step are provided as well as a pdf document were everything is documented in written form. The course is spilt into 6 major parts, which get longer and more complex. The parts are: rigging fundamentals, my first rig, spider ball rig, simple character rig, advanced character rig and full character rig.
So far, I browsed through the first chapter of rigging fundamentals. For me most of it is just repetition of what I already know. I still listen to the lessons because the course is for Blender and I have less experience with Blender than Maya. The repetitions should also help with the basics I might have forgotten parts of it. So far, I enjoy the course, even though it is nothing new to me. Basics such as what is rigging, parenting, constraints, armature objects or bones where covered. I will not go too much into the detailed explanations.
As for my goal of the blog posts, I want to follow along the course as much as possible and make a short video of the rigs created. The result will probably not be looking very pretty. Rigging feels to me a little bit like coding. It is a lot of thinking work, which can be annoying but very rewarding when it finally works out.
