Ranger Rig Production Part1

Every year or so I like to take on a big personal rigging project so I can pick up some new tricks without the pressures and constraints of an actual production. This time around I will be mixing in several ventures all aimed at creating a film quality rig that can be distributed to the animation community at large. I will start off by outlining the goals of this project while giving a few details on how I plan on achieving these goals. Now before I get too deep into this, let me issue a fair warning that I have a son on the way any day now, so this project could go several weeks without anything to report. Alrighty then, with my excuses out of the way, let's push on.

Goals

• Work with a small team to develop some rigging tools.  Except for the artsy stuff,  I hope to generate every part of this rig procedurally.  Details on this small team and that development process will be coming soon.
• Develop a robust facial rigging solution that looks great without a bunch of fancy deformers,  but is able to layer in deformers and blendshapes to push the look to the next level.
• Push myself to push my skills at cinematic quality rigging.
• Teach all of you about my process.  Hopefully we will both learn something new!  I won't be going full tutorial style on everything I do here, however I may make tutorials available in one form or another later on.  For now you can check out the Rigging Dojo, where you can get my Python class along with a ton of information on everything rigging related.

If I'm going to rig a character, I suppose I will need to start with a model.  No, not just any model.  It needs to be a great model.  Fortunately for me, the extremely talented Daniel Williams has offered up one of his creations for this mad science project.  I highly encourage you to check out his work.  This is typically the section where I would talk about good topology for rigging, but Danny's models already have fantastic topology.  I will talk briefly about what makes topology "fantastic", and I will do some comparisons between what I look for in a cinematic mesh versus a game ready mesh in later posts.  Before we get into all of that I want to show you what we'll be working with.

 

Check out this link to see the Ranger in all his rendered glory.


Here are some reasons why I think this topology is Fantastic!

• The continuous line across the brow.
• The edge that flows from the nose to the mouth furrow line.
• The clean circular edges around the mouth.
• The extruded face between the brows for a nice brow furrow.

While this is a great model, I will suggest the following edits to the face topology.

That's all I have time for tonight.  In my next post I want to start designing the requirements for this rig so I can break the work into chunks.  We will talk about how I determine those requirements, and my process for plotting out how to meet them.  Thanks for stopping by and I hope to see you here next time.