CHARACTER RIGGING


Selections from email...

One of our Jam participants was kind enough to locate and forward an extensive character rigging tutorial. I haven't actually gone through and read every bit of it yet, but it looks very detailed. In fact, it's 14MB worth of html pages, images, and downloadable files. This is really great stuff for us to have online and accessible.

Some of the file download links in the html pages are incorrect, but you can find these files here.

Lastly, the tutorial comes with an introduction by the author; a guy named Stephen Tubbrit. I'm including it here.


Hi, Guys

First off, I apologise for not having the tutorials online anymore myself, so a big thanks to those people kind enough to host the files.

Ok, some background information for those interested, when I was learning rigging, I ended up downloading just about everything I could find on the subject matter, and really ended up with a whole lot of data, I then started sifting through the whole collection, taking out, imo, the best bits from it all. I then sat and rigged the character you see in the tutorial, and documented the process as I went along, all in all, this took about a week to do, as I also had to sift through the different downloaded html pages I had found at the same time, that's probably why the tutorial is a bit disjointed in parts. Looking back over the tutorial, now compared to when I created it, I can see mistakes or things I simply wouldn't do anymore, the rigging of the character itself could've been done a lot better, especially seeing the fancy stuff everyone else seems to be able to do these days, I've considered bringing it up to date many times, but I assume people like the original as I purposely decided to steer clear of any scripting processes or plugins, etc, I tried to make it easy to follow for any beginner, and whilst I always intended it to be used as a 'helpful guide' rather than a strict 'this is the way to do it' article, I'm very happy people have found it useful.

Rigging for me was learned so that I could pose my characters, I do little to no animation at all, and I have the greatest respect for those that do animate and I'm completely openly envious of those! I'm employed within the games industry, and although I'm interested in high-res stuff, especially characters, I personally always feel the need to better myself and learn new technologies, hence the mental ray tutorials, etc and the need to pass on this information to those who would find it interesting, many, many years ago, during my lightwave era, I researched heavily the process of creating an photorealistic eye - updated here : -

http://users.tinyworld.co.uk/steven...stic_Eye_01.htm

and was contacted by Bill Fleming of komodo studio fame, I happily shared all my knowledge with him, his eyes were mapped sphere's originally, I passed on all my research and we co-wrote an eye tutorial which he then sold on as his own to 9 magazines, which was fair enough as he had named me as the research guy within the tutorial heading, he promised (although I wasn't paid) that he'd at least send me copied of the magazines, he didn't, the article appeared in Computer Arts UK here, where I was able to pick up a copy at my own expense, and the original article had changed from by Bill Fleming and Steven Tubbrit, to just Bill Fleming, with a tiny, tiny box hidden down the page with my name in it, he ignored me after that, and also after having shelled out £150 quid for his Serious3D magazine that never materialised either, so I got my fingers burnt there, it taught me a lesson, you can't put a price on education, and since then, any tutorials I have written I've given directly to the public wherever possible, I'm not a fan of the pig-headed attitude to keep information to yourself, because we're all in the same business at the end of the day, and sharing is the best thing we can do.

Posted: Sat - July 9, 2005 at 07:42 PM          

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