Lecture 17: Intro to Animation, Kinematics, Motion Capture (45)
kevkang
I'm wondering if rigging is at all related to the hierarchical structure we used for our vector man in Assignment 1. This would allow for pretty clear orders of motion right?
jpark96
Right, it would allow the artist to have full control. I think the point here is that the control has to be intuitive to humans. Instead of having animators learn matrix transformations and implementing it in code, we can transfer something more intuitive like puppeteering to animators. There'd also be a huge corpus of teachers and books on the art of puppeteering as well.
I feel really bad for animators though, since I'd imagine the state-of-the-art tools in entertainment would change every couple of years. Imagine learning to puppeteer for animation, only to realize that it's been replaced by machine learning :(
GKohavi
@kevkang I would assume that would be the way to do it, otherwise if you move a leg, you would have to move all of the joints below the leg as well.
tigreezy
I thought the slide was kind of vague about what it means to set higher level controls on characters. From wikipedia: "Rigging is making our characters able to move. The process of rigging is we take that digital sculpture, and we start building the skeleton, the muscles, and we attach the skin to the character, and we also create a set of animation controls, which our animators use to push and pull the body around." If I am understanding correctly, it's almost exactly the same as the box man from assignment 1 where things are attached to the skeleton and you can move one part of the skeleton and it'll move all the parts connected?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation
sunsarah
@tigreezy that makes sense to me, if that's the case then, would the video shown two slides ago (of the pink person moving by their arm) be an example of rigging? because the pink person was moved into different positions by their arm moving, and the rest of the body moved along with it (and looked decently natural as well)
go-lauren
summary: rigging is the process of creating a skeleton for a 3D model. Part of rigging includes weight painting, where each bone is given a weight. The skeleton can then be manipulated more intuitively and the model will move accordingly. The more detailed the rigging, the better results. From the rigging, they use inverse kinematics described earlier to animate movement.
Source: https://conceptartempire.com/what-is-rigging/
dtseng
I wonder how rigging is done to generalize to different characters for example? I'd imagine that every character has different topology/triangles that might correspond to the eyebrows for example. Wouldn't it be extremely difficult to redo this for every single character created for a film?
I'm wondering if rigging is at all related to the hierarchical structure we used for our vector man in Assignment 1. This would allow for pretty clear orders of motion right?
Right, it would allow the artist to have full control. I think the point here is that the control has to be intuitive to humans. Instead of having animators learn matrix transformations and implementing it in code, we can transfer something more intuitive like puppeteering to animators. There'd also be a huge corpus of teachers and books on the art of puppeteering as well.
I feel really bad for animators though, since I'd imagine the state-of-the-art tools in entertainment would change every couple of years. Imagine learning to puppeteer for animation, only to realize that it's been replaced by machine learning :(
@kevkang I would assume that would be the way to do it, otherwise if you move a leg, you would have to move all of the joints below the leg as well.
I thought the slide was kind of vague about what it means to set higher level controls on characters. From wikipedia: "Rigging is making our characters able to move. The process of rigging is we take that digital sculpture, and we start building the skeleton, the muscles, and we attach the skin to the character, and we also create a set of animation controls, which our animators use to push and pull the body around." If I am understanding correctly, it's almost exactly the same as the box man from assignment 1 where things are attached to the skeleton and you can move one part of the skeleton and it'll move all the parts connected? Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeletal_animation
@tigreezy that makes sense to me, if that's the case then, would the video shown two slides ago (of the pink person moving by their arm) be an example of rigging? because the pink person was moved into different positions by their arm moving, and the rest of the body moved along with it (and looked decently natural as well)
summary: rigging is the process of creating a skeleton for a 3D model. Part of rigging includes weight painting, where each bone is given a weight. The skeleton can then be manipulated more intuitively and the model will move accordingly. The more detailed the rigging, the better results. From the rigging, they use inverse kinematics described earlier to animate movement. Source: https://conceptartempire.com/what-is-rigging/
I wonder how rigging is done to generalize to different characters for example? I'd imagine that every character has different topology/triangles that might correspond to the eyebrows for example. Wouldn't it be extremely difficult to redo this for every single character created for a film?