Analysis of Design Principles and Requirements for Procedural Rigging of Bipeds and Quadrupeds Characters with Custom Manipulators for Animation

Character rigging is a process of endowing a character with a set of custom manipulators and controls making it easy to animate by the animators. These controls consist of simple joints, handles, or even separate character selection windows.This research paper present an automated rigging system for quadruped characters with custom controls and manipulators for animation.The full character rigging mechanism is procedurally driven based on various principles and requirements used by the riggers and animators. The automation is achieved initially by creating widgets according to the character type. These widgets then can be customized by the rigger according to the character shape, height and proportion. Then joint locations for each body parts are calculated and widgets are replaced programmatically.Finally a complete and fully operational procedurally generated character control rig is created and attached with the underlying skeletal joints. The functionality and feasibility of the rig was analyzed from various source of actual character motion and a requirements criterion was met. The final rigged character provides an efficient and easy to manipulate control rig with no lagging and at high frame rate.Comment: 21 pages, 24 figures, 4 Algorithms, Journal Pape

Non-Traditional Rig for virtual environment systems. Case study: Arm rig

Este trabajo presenta nuevas especificaciones de diseño para rigs de esqueleto basado en problemas encontrados en Entornos Virtuales, tomando en cuenta sus limitaciones y requerimientos, y la relación entre los usuarios y el avatar que encarnan. Este acercamiento es una alternativa al rig de esqueleto tradicionalmente usado en animación, que puede generar deformaciones indeseadas en el mesh, ya que suelen ser hechos con animación artesanal, y optimización de software, en mente. Este Trabajo incluye resultados prometedores en cuanto a una deformación más natural de la muñeca de un personaje digital, validado con la evaluación subjetiva de ocho expertos en el área de producción 3D.1- Introducción 2- Trabajos Previos 3- Nuestro Enfoque 4- Experimento y Resultados 5- ConclusiónThis paper presents new design specifications for skeleton rigs based on Virtual Environment problems, taking into account their limitations and requirements, and the relationship between users and the virtual avatar they embody. This approach is an alternative to traditional skeleton rigs used in animation, which may generate undesirable deformations in the mesh since they are usually made with handcrafted animation, and software optimization, in mind. This work includes promissory results in the naturalness of the deformation of the wrist of a digital character, validated with eight experts’ subjective evaluation in 3D production.Pregrad

Widget based automated rigging of bipedal character with custom manipulators

In this research paper we present an automated rigging system for a humanoid (biped) character with complete customization and control options according to the need of the character rigger and the animator. The rigging requirements check list has been proposed for each body part by analyzing various live natural human motions and then summarizing them. The system initially provides widgets that represent human skeletal joints, which can be easily manipulated and modified according to the character type and body height. The system takes the widgets positions from the 3D space and creates the joint based skeletal structure automatically using procedural programming and then followed by creating a complete bipedal rig with custom manipulators to satisfy the animators need in a production environment