Rig!!!

Building a custom rig !!!

For animating purposes and the use of character studio this character will need to have its own custom rig built to match the mesh.

What a rig basically its the bones in which the custom mesh is attached or skinned to so that its easier to animate with the bones instead of having to animates through polygons.

To build a rig the user must first go into CAT objects and drag out a CAT Parent. Once this is done the user can begin building their bones and the starting point would be a pelvis. Once the pelvis has been created it is placed just above the waist of the human mesh.

Now its time to add legs which can easily be done by selecting the add leg button on the rig options. a leg will appear and it needs to dragged and put into place and rule number one when creating the rig is to have it matching as much as possible to the mesh because this will help hugely  when completing a stress test.

Once the leg is in place to make the second one, Add leg should be selected again and the leg in which was edited to math the mesh will be mirrored over and should need none or minor adjustment to match the other leg. Moving on the next step would be to select the pelvis again and this time select add spine. This option creates a spine above the pelvis and can be updated to match the mesh and the amount of bones in the spine can be adjusted in the editing tools in the rig options panel.

Next step would be o creates the arm this can be done by selecting the top bone of the spine and selecting add arm to it and an arm should appear and be attached ready to the spine or shoulders. Then again just some adjustments need to be conducted so the bones match the bones and once one arm is complete by pressing add arm again this arm should be mirrored across to the other side of the body. One thing about the arms is that if the mesh has fingers the bones can be added by inputting the number of bones required on the palm of the hand and not by pressing add bone.

After completing the arms and fingers the final step would be to add the neck and head which isn’t very difficult. If the user was to select the top of the spine or shoulders the user may add another spine with fewer bones and re adjust it to match the head mesh.

This would mean that rig creating is complete. Some advise from personal experience is that make sure the bones match the rig in size and width because it will prove a challenge when skinning has to be applied. This is because certain bones wont attach to the mesh that will mean the movements wont look very smooth and further editing will have to be done.