Rigging and Skinning - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 129

libraries and linking with your characters, the proxy creation process is touchy enough that multiple control
objects for the same character (e.g., a character with controls spread across two separate armatures) may or may
not survive the proxy creation process, potentially rendering your rig useless for linking.
Obviously, control structures will vary in complexity, based on the animation needs of the character. Different
levels of complexity may even appear in the same rig and can be shown separately by placing them on dif-
ferent bone layers within their armature. Blender provides 16 layers for bones in each armature for organiza-
tional purposes, as well as the ability to group bones for easy selection and visualization.
You can spend a lot of time creating custom-shaped controls for your rigs and really cleaning up their func-
tionality. This, however, is another potential time-sink for your project. Make sure that the amount of time
you spend on a rig makes sense with the amount of time the character will spend on screen. Obviously, your
main character (or characters) should get signifi cantly more love from your rigging skills than incidental or
background characters.
As you can see from the disparity between the mother's rig and the Maloyo rig, there are also varying levels
of “fanciness” you can build into your rig. If you are going to be the only animator and your project is of
limited scope, it makes sense to keep things basic. However, if you are going to be handing off your animation
fi les to other team members or think you may be taking long breaks during the project, you'll want to spend
the time to make the controls more user friendly and accessible.
Deformers
The controls that are used when animating must be translated into motion and deformation of the character
model. There are a number of ways to deform mesh objects in Blender, only some of which we will deal
with: direct Armature deformation, lattices, and mesh cages. None of these, however, will be directly visible or
accessible by the animator when the full character is linked into a scene.
In The Beast , both the Beast and the mother use a combination of mesh cages and vertex group deformation,
while the dogs use cage deformers exclusively. The Beast's ragged toy uses vertex groups and a lattice. We'll
examine each of these methods and their usefulness in an animation project.
Helpers
While some of the functionality of your rig might be contained in the controls themselves, anything but the
simplest of rigs will require some sort of structure between the control elements and the deformers. These
are the helpers, and they will not be seen by the animator under normal conditions. You can think of them
as the “inner workings” of the rig. Blender provides 16 layers for bones in each armature, so, unless you are
creating the ultimate all-purpose rig, you should be able to manage with a couple of layers for controls, some
for deformers and some for intermediate bones.
General Rigging and Skinning Work Flow
Before we begin to analyze a rig and look at specifi c techniques, let's run down a general work fl ow for
developing and testing a multilayered rig.