Advanced Human Rig

This year I finished my first in-depth rig for Rigging 2. I learned a lot with this rig, mainly how customizable one rig can be and why hierarchy is important and how it can affect the smaller parts of rigs. The most valuable thing I learned with this rig was all of the things you can add to a rig to make it as dynamic as you want; and which ones to include and leave out dependent on what the animator wants.

This rig was challenging for a lot of reasons. I'd never made a rig this complex before and at first, I didn’t know how to debug a rig. This led to a few minor issues, but I didn't start really struggling with it until I added the automatic shoulder.
When I first introduced it to the rig, everything worked fine, but there were a few times where I would test it, press ctrl z, and the arm would explode. After a bit of exploring, I found a hierarchy issue with the arm's IK chain and after parenting it to the correct group, everything worked fine.
This was also my first-time weight painting something this complex. Before this project, most of the things I weight painted had less than half of the joints this rig had. The rigs before this one also didn’t have shoulders, which was my most challenging part to weight paint. Beyond the shoulders, I struggled with blending weights, especially around the neck, shoulder blades, and hips. I ran into a few issues where I would accidentally subtract values from my weights when I thought I was adding weights. In the end, I was able to fix the issue by locking joint weights.
I'm proud of the stretch and squash additions to the rig, specifically on the spine, and my favorite part would be the additions around the eyes. I used nodes to influence the geometry on the eyelids as the eyes move to create an extra detail that makes the animation feel more alive. The facial deformations are also something I’m proud of since this was my first time creating them. In the future, I would push the eyebrow and upper cheek deformations further to closer match the extremes of the mouth deformations.
If there was anything I could do again, it would be the IK/FK matching code. The code I wrote to match the two chains worked when matching FK to IK, but had issues moving IK to FK because of the wrist and ankle groups. I was able to track down what I think may have been the issue, the groups I was using had translation values from the torso group, but I wasn’t able to figure out how to fix it. I also struggled a bit with weight painting the swimsuit and had to scale it up to have it properly deform to the body. I’m decently happy with how it turned out, however, I would go in and add deformers for the suit if I could do it again to help mitigate some of the blocky movement around the swimmer’s neck.
Moving forward, I look forward to using the techniques that I learned in this rig (the weight painting, node-based setup, the ribbon/stretch spine) towards rigs specified for animation. In particular, prop rigs.
Overall, this rig was a fun and interesting challenge that I’m very pleased with. With this rig, I learned how to make limbs have volume, squash, and stretch. How to create a ribbon spine, how to create facial controls and deformations. As well as how to code IK/FK matching as well as how to create and code an IK/FK space switching option, and how to bind clothing.