Welcome to my first blog post for the Technical Art Applications module. For this module our goal is to fully rig a 3D character model and to produce one Maya script that will help in this process.
So far we’ve mostly worked with a character rig named “Grunt”, a basic rig but a working rig that can be posed, animated and imported into engines. A rig works by having selectable control shapes which can be translated or rotated which interacts with the character model mesh in a certain way. Some control shapes have additional attributes which can do something else such as twisting or lifting the foot at different locations of the foot, rather than just moving the whole foot at once with the controller.
Some rigs work differently from others and no two are the same. For example in one rig (like Grunt) the hand controller moves the entire arm around and there is a separate object you move around to point the elbow, whereas in other controllers you rotate the shoulder then rotate the elbow, then rotate the hand.
The rig we create should be focused towards a certain area such as having a use in games or animation particularly. Rigs for games have to work with the restrictions of real time rendering whereas rigs for animation do not. This will be something I choose later depending on my rig and preference.