Hello Readers today I am going to talk about rigging your favorite models for Visual3d. To start out with I have a sample model in its low poly form provided by my good friend Andrew Dyksterhouse. With this model is has a lot of physical detail that will need to be rigged for the animators to make full use of the model.

As you can see in the image below this model has a great amount of detail in the face which will help for ingame cutscenes to be made showing off the creatures reactions in the scene. This is great for a the animators as it gives them a great deal of options when creating a cinematic feel. Some of the most important things to consider when beginning to rig your model is if there are any types of bone number limits you might have to work with. I know when I first began working on this model Visual3D had a 70 bone cap. I do believe they have already or are working to raise this cap but I will use it for now becasue it gives us a number to shoot for.

One of the first things to consider when working within a bone limit is your minimum number of bones to get the model to move correctly. For this it is simple to start. We have in this character a traditional biped. WIth a biped you have to remember that you will have to have working and flexable arms and legs. You will need the structure to support the arms in legs in the chest and hips in order to make the character able to move. The number of bones you use in the chest will vary with the model but keep in mind that the more bones you can spare into the chest and stomach the more flexible the model will be for the animators. With the best he has an unconventional set of legs which gives him a few more bones needed in order to complete the leg chains. For him we will need 6 bones for each leg not counting the hips we will mount them to.

Next up are the arms which with most standard bipeds you will be looking to create a set up similiar to this: Clavicle->UpperArm->LowerArm->Wrist. With this set up you can then branch off of the wrist to create the rest of the hand. Below you can see the set up I have chosen for this model which will give the animators some degree of control for the fingers while helping to keep down the bone limit. You can do all of the fingers discounting the thumb with only 3 bones but this creates a somewhat unrealistc "Glove Hand" effect. The best way I found to give some flexibility to the model while saving bones is to simply do the fingers by groupings. This should work fine in a game setting though you may need to rerig the model if it is being used in any cinemas. The thumb will almost always need it own set of bones because of its position on the hand though it will ususally only need three bones. Once you have all of the fingers in order you can simply link them to the wrist bone so you will have them moving with the arm IK or FK chain.

Nex thing that is important to cover on this model is the head. With this model is has a lot of potential for facial animation so with what bones we have left over from the essentials listed above we can go wild with creating a emotive creature that the players will actually fear. As you can see below, and I may need to enlarge the images for these, that the tongue itself has about 5 bones to itself in order to make it fully flexable. The head usually only needs one large bone as well as the neck to attach it to the chest. For this one you can see it has 3 extra bones in each ear. After all the rigging was done we had plenty of room left to add more bones and this seemed like a great place to add. With the long ears like this you can add more bones to give it more bounce once it starts running.

Well I will consider this Part 1 of many posts comming up on character rigging and some good practices and methods you can consider when working on your own characters. Plese feel free to email me with any feedback or questions as I will be happy to answer them.