Character Rigging

[vudathasai2]

Hey, I'm learning rigging,

I'm trying to rig a realistic character, I would like to known people use the different mesh for the head and the body or both as a single mesh and rig???

and I wanted to known how people rig realistic character people any plugin or maya rigging way?

thanks

[gautham.chandran47]

That is just a personal choice. There are merits and demerits for both. In my instance, I would like to get the whole character's body as a single mesh and all other accessories/cloths separate mesh. If the whole body is a single mesh there won't be any uneven deformation. And I can simply copy the skin weight from the body to the clothing. 

This, of course, depends on the needs. If it's for a game engine or a low resource setup I would recommend the other method as it will remove all the mesh which is not visible.

For the plug-ins, there are not much for character rigging but most professional riggers would have their own custom scripts or inhouse tools from their company. Don't worry about that much.

[vudathasai2]

Thanks

[vudathasai2]

Cool Thanks gautham,

I'm not worried about the other accessories and clothing I can get them from simulation, I wanted to known what is the best for the rigging either combining the body and head, or separate, coz I'll be using blend shapes for the facial animation to the head.. and I'm trying on a realistic character instead of cartoon...

[gautham.chandran47 · Accepted solution]

If that's the case I would recommend going with a single mesh for the whole body. This way you can eliminate the chances of having skin weight distribution issues on the contact points of two-part of mesh and weird simulation issues ( very slight chance ).

Hope this helps.

[narwhalr]

I've been away from Maya for a bit. I'm working to create a rig with the quick rig tool I keep getting a an error message when I use the tool to use selected guides as source for mirroring left guides to right guides. The error message is (Please perform skeleton embedding first) What is this and how do I fix the problem?

The YouTube video that I'm following doesn't have or cover this issue.