Bet you thought I'd never update this thing

So I got a job as a character rigger at Threshold Animation Studios. It turns out everything I learned along the way has come in handy.

I walked in with a suite of rigging tools I created. This turned out to be a real good thing. The first thing I had to do was mod them to conform to the in-house naming conventions. This would have been harder using downloadable rigging tools, since most of them have multiple library calls and tracking down the naming conventions in all the disparate global procs would have been daunting.

The other thing, is that the studio has special requirements which required serious modifications to the functionality of the rigging scripts.

If you look at http://casadiablos.com/steph/stephInterfaces.htm, you can see the base interfaces I use in my tool kit. I've added a spur builder, which creates customized bone spurs to tailor autoskinning. I can interactively resize them to fit the character, then move them around to where the autoskinning needs the greatest influence from the parent bone.

The other advantages to having a whole suite of tools, is naming conformity. This makes it easier to have all other tools act on the given objects. In the case of the spurs, it's [bone name]_A(B,C,D,etc)_SPUR.

I wrote a script that takes the skin assignments for every vertex and CV, and writes them to a file. All of them. For every object. This kind of duplicates the functionality of skin maps, but at the same time, it's a one stop process. Not a bunch of individual files for each object. I had to create my own file format for that.

This was a fortuitous development, because the character models are frequently revised. If the modifications are minor, like character proportions, with no added vertices/CVs, then I just save out the weights on the old character, reposition the skeleton and reload the file. Voila!

While objects that are modified severely or have new vertices added can't necessarily use the old weight assignments, often it's only part of the character that's been modded, and I can go back to the spurred version of the character before the skin weighting spurs were removed, and reassign that part of the character.

Another handy tool I developed allows me to de-assign unwanted weights. You don't want the abdomen to deform when you move the arm. I have a checkbox arrangement for the common bones, and a text entry field for bones added later. These bones include all the child spurs.

I updated sg_syncOb. I haven't uploaded it yet, since it uses the house naming convention and is proprietary at this time. But it now includes a zooty arrow-ball as a controller type. When it's fully updated, it will also offer the option of creating a joint with selectable shapes to select that joint as a controller. This had the advantage of being able to use the jointOrient attribute for externally rotating the controller, such as using the forearm to rotate an IK control foreward kinematically, while still being able to animate that controller's rotation on top of it. Very useful, but it's tricky to get working and not without it's pathologies.

So here are the features of the rigging suite:
Skeleton: creates guide spheres that are interactively scaleable to get close to the character's proportions, and creates a base FK skeleton conforming to the house naming convention. Options are selectable number of fingers, and number of bones in the fingers, back, head, neck, arms and legs. The code is there for tail, ears and pony tail, but I haven't connected it to the interface. There's also a checkbox to turn axes on and off for the entire skeleton interactively. The guide sphere portion has a mirror function so I only have to align half the spheres in the appendages. All numeric options for number of bones and scaling of the guide spheres use sliders but numbers can be manually entered as well.
Make Control Objects: This just brings up the latest revision of syncOb.
Create Spurs: This makes the bone spurs for skinning. It arranges the bones in a circle around the parent bone, and names them as mentioned above. There's a selectable number of bones, the axis of the bone to arrange them in a circle, and interactive radius adjustment. The interactive radius can be used by selecting the parent bone at a later time and using the slider as well. Buttons are "Create Spurs", "Spur to Joint" (which takes all the spur assignments and adds them to the parent bone), and "Delete Spurs" (which deletes the no-longer needed spurs after using "Spur to Joint").
Rename Skeleton and Control Objects: This allows me to create joints by hand, say additional spurs going in a non-circular orientation, and then rename them to conform to the naming convention. The text fields include "Jointname", starting letter, and suffix (JNT, CTL, etc). Works on any number of selected object and indexes them with increasing alphabetical representation (B, C, D, etc).
Remove Unwanted Weights: As mentioned above, this removes weight influences from bones that you don't want influencing that section of the character. There are checkboxes for non-left-right bones, and individual checkboxes for the left and right appendages so I can remove the influences from autoskinning like the left femur, tibia, and foot bones from influencing the right. There's also the aformentioned text field for entering bone names not represented by a check box. Buttons are "Delete Weights" and "Clear Check Boxes" (which also clears the text field).
Save/Read Weights: This has a filename field that you can manually type, as well as buttons that call up a file requester to set your directory path and name for the file. I have a filetype I created, and the suffix is automatically added. There's a "Get" button to get the file with the same type of requester. Unfortunately, I couldn't customize the default filetype, so you have to enter *.weight (that's not the actual suffix name) to see the .weight files. Buttons are "Save Weights", "Delete Existing Weights" (removes all current skin assignments, required to read the file or it will error on read if it doesn't double assign, a bad thing), "Read/Reset Weights" (which will delete and read the weights), and "Read Weights Only".
Make Chain Stretchy: This allows me to select the start joint and end joint for a stretchy chain, using either RP (standard IK) or SplineIK. It also strictly names (with the joint base names) all the various nodes it takes to make a stretchy chain so they can be easily identified when manually editing the conditional, multiply/divide, distance and curveInfo nodes. Radio buttons for the axes select the the axes along the joint that are scaled by the stretchy command. There are also radio buttons for RP and Spline construction, and an option to create a stretchy single bone.

I'm also working on a conversion utility to take the "animation" information off of a skeleton with House of Moves channel data brought in to Maya through the FBX importer, and convert that to combined rotational and positional data to drive an advanced IK rig for hand keying over motion capture without a slow, double rig being needed (the way you can do it in Motion Builder). The tool also takes frames numbered using a time code scheme and puts them at frame 1. I'll add a feature to the interface that lets you set the start frame at an arbitrary number. This also allows for importation of the data onto reskinned characters, and I'll probably figure out a way to allow the data to be put onto non proportionally similar characters for crowd scenes.

A parallel project of mine is an addition to the autorigger that sets up all of the controls automatically (usually a standard feature of autoriggers), with the addition of a double hierarchy so the mocap data can be imported, but you can animate using stretchy IK on top of that. I'm dubious about the ability of this system to use space switching techniques because of the underlying motion capture data, but we'll see. As far as I can plan, if there is space switching, it has to be done before the mocap data is applied. This represents a similar problem for foot axis pivot switching.

I've started learning about dynamics. My initial impression is that to get the results you want for complex limbs and such, it takes so much tweaking that it would just be faster to hand animate it. But we'll see where I can make it useful.

At this time, I'm not going to be doing tutorials. I don't really have the time, and I'd really rather wait until my tools and techniques have been battle tested a bit more.

Thanks for reading. Hopefully I'll have a chance to update this a little more often.