Build or Use A Rig?

[Anonymous]

Hi Everyone! I'm an intermediate Level Character Animator with long term goals of being able to rig and animate at a professional level. I've been doing it for a few years, and I'd like to step up my game and try to optimize my workflow, but I have two serious questions before I take that step.

Question 1: Assuming I'd like to be able to eventually rig and animate the characters you see in some of the recent Final Fantasy games, would it be better if I adopted one of the many publicly available/purchasable rigs. Or would it be better to build my own from scratch?

Question 2: In your experience, what auto-rigging tool/rig has saved you the most time when needing to quickly weight paint a high quality character?

Thank you so much for your time!

[mihirsbcc]

Use Maya's Quick Rig. It also binds the skin as geodesic voxel binding method. Does pretty good skinning. You have to polish it though. It does not create facial rigging. Among 3rd party rigging apps Advance Skeleton is one of the best. It used to cost $200/ some years back, now it is free. It does pretty good facial rigging too.

[tdHendrix · Accepted solution]

Hi Kevin,

To answer your first question, if you want to rig at a professional level then you should learn how to build a rig from scratch for learning purposes. Then if you decide to use a pre-made auto rigging system you'll have a better understanding of what's going on. As far as auto rigging systems go, I hear good things about mGear and it's also free which is a nice plus.

For weight painting check out ngSkinTools. I also use the free smooth weights brush from Brave Rabbit a lot: http://www.braverabbit.com/braverabbit/tools/brsmoothweights/

[Anonymous]

These responses were very helpful, thank you! I think my post has been answered 🙂