RIG RESEARCH
SMALL AND NIMBLE...
I knew ultimately my direction of my film was going to be dictated by the availability of rigs; so I went looking. I was already aware of the Sylvanas rig, which may have retroactively influenced my bow and arrow decision. Preferably I wanted to utilise two rigs of the same universe, but I knew that finding another Warcraft rig that could do the things that I wanted was going to be a struggle, so I went on a hunt for a fantasy style character with a comparable art style.
Kiel Figgins is an animator with a website (http://www.3dfiggins.com/) that has many animation resources and rigs, both paid and free. I used his website for my body mechanics exercise in the second year, and knew that his site was a good resource for high quality rigs. On his site, there were several good candidates for the big character.
(War Chief, Troll Hunter and Metal Boss from http://www.3dfiggins.com/Store/)
The Troll Hunter and War Chief were both close to the designs that I wanted, a sort-of hulking goliath type character; however I felt that their art style didn’t quite match the Sylvanas rig. At this point in time, using Sylvanas wasn’t set in stone, but I needed both characters to believably exist in the same world. The War Chief model is a character from Warcraft, but ultimately I felt like his size and style wouldn’t give me what I needed for the animation.
The metal boss character was a slight tangent. I liked his size and large hammer but knew that I would have to go a different route and find a rig to replace Sylvanas so I quickly wrote him off
Then I found the Goliath rig. His style was similar enough to Sylvanas that I felt they could co-exist and his proportions would believably scale to be ~10ft tall. The only downside was that he included a sword rather than a large hammer.
But after some deliberation, I bit the bullet and purchased him for $35, deciding that I can make a hammer myself.
animation tests
Before I fully finalized my decisions, I thought it was important to do some rudimentary animation tests, in order to get a feel for the rigs and what the could do. These were only quick, but insightful as to what controls were available, and more importantly, what controls weren't.
Small things like being conscious of how many loose parts are on both characters (chains and cloth on the goliath; feathers, cape and hair on Sylvanas). These were things that I might have to hand animate down the line which would be a time sink.
Other things like the guard on Sylvanas' bow being awkward to pose with, would lead me to quickly discard it in order to obtain better silhouettes.
FK/IK Snapping:
Since I've used Kiel Figgins rigs before, I was aware that they lacked an FK-IK Snap. However, I also knew that he offers a MEL script that solves that very problem.
All you have to do is run the script in the script editor and then type kfAnimRig_IKFK(); in the MEL Editor. I added the script to my custom shelf and now whenever I need to snap between FK and IK, I can just run the custom script and do it with ease.
Animatable Pivot:
One issue that I had to investigate early on, was regarding animatable pivot points.
A big part of selling the weight of the hammer, is having it pivot on the head when picked up. I did some research into rigging movable pivots as seen in the left video, but it wasn't exactly what I needed.
Thankfully, I then discovered a much simpler solution. In the channel controls settings, you can enable the pivot vectors as keyable properties. This makes them appear in your attribute editor and allows you to key their location and rotation to meet your desires.
I demonstrated this in a Hammer test, along with testing the hammers self driven, single handed and two handed constraints.
Proxy Rigs:
One of the things I noticed when starting my Previz, was that having both characters in the scene at the same time, impacted performance. It wasn't unworkable, but I know from experience that nothing ruins my workflow like slow software. The Sylvanas rig did include a game ready version with a much lower polycount* that I could use temporarily for the Previz, however it didn't include the face rig so I knew I'd have to switch it out eventually.
Then, when reading through the animation resources on Kiel Figgins website, I came across a great tutorial on creating proxy rigs. He provides a fantastic tool that makes constraining low poly geo to the joints incredibly simple, as well as a feature that mirrors the constraint so you only have to do half a job.
*(the game ready version actually has the same polycount, for reasons I'll explain later)
Very quickly I was able to build proxy versions for my characters that will hopefully save me a lot of time and hassle in the future.
With the Sylvanas rig, I debated whether to build a proxy for the cape. It is a big part of her silhouette and would effect posing and framing, but figured that since I plan on simulating her cape, it would be unnecessary