Rigging Part 5: Adapting the Rig and Pipelining

By working in a dynamic group, we did our best to organize pipelining in such a way that all members of the group were working and developing at all given moments in time. For example, whist I was working on the Rig, the animators were attempting to get walk cycles with a standard quadruped.

In particular I was working in close collaboration with the modeling department. As I was building the rig, Ollie Kane was continuously amending the mesh. in order to overcome and avoid duplicating work- I had to learn methods of transferring the progress I made at each stage up until the point where I would receive the final version.

Here are some images that show the progress of my rigging at different stages

Beginning to consider footroll issues

Here is the version of my first completed rig. However, when I gave this on to the animators to test, it proved to be inadequate. In this way I had to work with the animators and Director constantly. In this way I could ascertain the limits of the rig. In my next postings, notice the removal of the head/neck control to show when I re-rigged the character from scratch. 

The problems with this rig included improper movements on the legs and neck at the cost of very detailed foot controls! This had to be addressed in the next draft.