Character Setup and Rigging

Game characters like Lara Croft are among the most looked-at art in video games.

And why? It's because they're properly set up and convincingly animated. Before any 3D character can dive off a cliff or repel across a ravine, a technical artist must set up, rig, skin, and test a character skeleton to prepare it for animation.

Setting up a character

The focus of this three-lesson course is to take you inside a character model and teach you to build skeletons, rig your characters, "skin" them, and pose the characters, testing them for animation. You'll walk through the process of creating joints to assemble a skeleton, fine-tuning joints for realistic motion, rigging bodies and faces, and binding your character's skin to its skeleton. Each practical project uses Autodesk Maya and helps you prepare your character models for the ultimate goal: animation.

Throughout the course, you'll benefit from developer Todd Gantzler's years of video game art experience. You'll tackle character setup tasks employed in the professional environment and receive expert critique and feedback on your work.

Todd Gantzler is a 2D and 3D computer graphics artist and educator ... get bio

Set up a complete skeleton for a 3D model.

Place joints in appropriate locations for realistic movement.

Configure the axes of rotation of joints for a natural range of motion.

Rig a character using inverse kinematics and forward kinematics.

Set up groups and hierarchies to control inverse kinematics.

Rig a face using the blend shapes method and the skeleton method.

Bind a character's skeleton to its mesh with smooth binding and rigid binding.

Paint weights on vertices so the mesh will deform properly with all joint movements.

Limit the motion of joints by locking transforms and setting joint rotation restrictions.

Create natural character poses to test the motion of the skeleton and mesh.

LESSON 1 Character Skeletons and Joints It's time to get to the bare bones of character setup with a study of skeletons and joints. In the first lesson, you'll get an overview of the setup process, and start creating joints for a character, hands on. You'll use Maya to create a complete body skeleton and learn important techniques for fine-tuning it. Giving your characters a natural range of motion is essential. You'll learn how to make this happen with simple Maya tools. In the exercise, you'll repeat this process on your own character model, creating a complete skeleton based on what you've learned and animation requirements of your unique character.

LESSON 2 Rigging a Character With a skeleton in place, the next step is to rig your model—setting up the controls for your skeleton. This lesson examines how to set up both types of controls (inverse kinematics and forward kinematics) for different parts of your character, creating hierarchies that will allow the character to animate convincingly. You'll then explore two methods for rigging a character's face: blend shapes and skeletons. You'll create a complete rig for your own character in the exercise, making important motion control decisions along the way.

LESSON 3 Skinning and Posing a Character To make a game character animate properly, you'll need to ensure the character's skin (its polygon mesh) will flex realistically each time a joint moves. Lesson Three focuses on a process delightfully known to game artists as "skinning" a character—binding the character's skeleton to the mesh. You'll learn how the character's mesh is bound through smooth and rigid binding, how to paint body and face weights to obtain appropriate mesh deformation, and how to lock joint rotation to natural limits. You'll wrap up the course with a look how to pose your character and test out your model. In the last exercise, you'll finalize your character, binding and weighting your model and putting it in dramatic poses.