How to rig a Character in any software. What to consider.

Hello Peeps and welcome to another fresh and exciting edition of Animations on HypefroActive. Ok so this is a fresh month and i've managed to produce two animation shots last month that have been published on YouTube plus another which i just uploaded this morning all coming down to three. Yep, i'm on fire and it's all thanks to you guys for the support and encouragement. And today i'll be talking about How to rig and what to expect in the way you set up your rigs while Animating. So here we go.

Alright prior to learning how to animate, i learnt how to rig characters. The rig as you know are what drives the models or mesh and serves as the skeletons of the mesh. Rigging has to be taken very seriously if you want the desired results for your animations. Meaning if you have a character for instance that will be dancing then you'll need a very flexible rig especially for the spine and the connections to the head, so that the spine is broken into like three or more segments and the more segments you break them into, the better the quality of animation but the more work you get to do. But this again will depend on the type of rig you have set up. If its a manual rig wherein you have to animate every bone, helper or controller Ooooorrr if its an automatic type where certain bones or helpers within a setup say the spine for instance, where you have about three bones and the middle bone is constrained to the first and last by means of the position and rotational constraints. This makes the work easier but not necessarily finer or better. But you really do a lot less work compared to it been in the manual.

A Naked Manual rig

I follow a lot of online schools and watch there awesome reels and its just so cool seeing how their students  churn out spectacular reels. And sometimes i go as far as reading their reviews and you here people saying things like, "how can i get these school type of rig"? Or the rig is what makes the animation different or special. Well, they are partly right in how they think and in there judgement of everything, but first thing first these guys actually know how to animate. They understand these things and are able to break them down in any order or manner they choose. So it's not like the rig do these stuffs automatically after been set up. You as an Animator still need to Animate stuff to produce results and that means setting up and understanding the rig.

Manual Rig with Controls

Every part of a rig has sections and segments. The spine is a section having as much segments as you choose or woul want it to have in a rig. The arm has the clavicle, upper and lower arms, hand and fingers as segments while the lower arm has the bones in the wrist that performs the twist otherwise the mesh would appear ruptured when attempting to twist the hand.

So just like the war between the "pose to pose" and "straight ahead" methods OR animating on "1s or 2s" and many other stuffs in the Animation world causing a debate, rigging is no different. The manual and automatic types of rig complement each other. You just have to use what where and this will largely depend on what you hope to achieve. If you doing normal animation stuffs like walking, running or normal chores that dont need exceptional hip poses, then any type of necessary rig would do. But if you are doing a dance and maybe a fight then its most

The Auto rig with constraints at the Hands and spines

likely the manual that would fair better because of the added advantage of turning a bone whenever you want it to, instead of it reacting to two or so bones its constrained to. This doesn't mean that the automatic wont do well here as i have used the automatic setup on many occasions than i can remember. But if you want the cartoony type of overlapping action somewhere around the spine then use the manual. Ok, thats all about rigging types and i'll see you guys some other time.