Hello and welcome back to Spacetime Studios art-technology blog.

Last time we talked about one of our cinematic character animation tools entitled Autoskel. The Autoskel tool is used to create perfectly named and oriented skeletons for use with our game engine. With this installment, we will talk about Autoskel’s sister tool , Autorig.

Autorig is a tool that is designed to eliminate the chore of rigging characters manually by hand and to maintain naming and orientation consistency for the development of pose tools.

Autorig produces rigging with the following capabilities:

• Helper objects for joint selection
• Arm controllers for IK-FK switching
• Arm controls for local and world IK space
• Foot controls for toe tip, ball, heel rotations
• Automated ulna solution
• Separate hip swivel
• Shoulder Pad helpers that orient to arms or clavicles
• Automated scaling of helpers based on character height
• Custom material on arm joints that causes visibility to be transparent when switching between IK and FK
• Automatically freezes all transforms so they can be reset to zero.
• Complete foot control
• Standard and precise naming convention for all skeletal controls

Autorig accomplishes these tasks based on the fact that Autoskel creates perfectly named and oriented joints. The only significant difference between rigging then created by Autorig is character scale. To use Autorig an artist need only place the back of the heel and the tip of the toe. Once that is done Autorig has all the information it needs to create the characters rigging.

Here you can see the arm controls. There is an FK-IK override as well as the ability to snap IK to FK and vice versa. Also note that there are two IK controls, one which follows the chest, and one which is linked to the world. Those to can have their solutions snapped to and fro.

The Shoulder pads have overrides that affect their behavior as to what parent they follow, the clavicle or the arm, and can blend between the two.

The spine, neck and head joints have helpers located well outside the body for very easy selection and are linked in a hierarchy that can be group rotated on local axis at the same time.

The Pelvis helper controls hip swing, while the Center Root helper controls the center of gravity.

Autorig creates a reverse foot setup which is wired to a set of custom attributes. An animator can animate any of the sub helpers directly or just edit the values on the main foot control.In addition to setting up all the control helpers, wiring and IK, Autorig also sets up the controller lists, the constraints and freezes the transforms for all animated elements of the rig. Autorig takes less than ten seconds to run and saves our animators of many hours of labor and frustration.

Well, that’s all for this installment of the Art Technology BLOG, next time we’ll take a look at our Pose tools

Best,

• Ranjeet Singhal

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 11th, 2007 at 3:38 am and is filed under Art Team Blogs, Developer Blogs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.