Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Understanding Rigging
Now that you've created your color map in a digital painting program, you can return to
Blender and begin to rig your zombie. Rigging is the process of building an armature and
linking it to a mesh. An armature acts much like the wire skeletons of claymation charac-
ters—the audience sees the clay outside, but the animator is actually moving and posing
a metal armature inside the clay. Working with armatures is an integral part of turning
a character mesh into an interactive game asset, because it allows characters to move and
pose realistically (Figure 7.1).
Whereas Chapter 5, “Sculpting for Normal Maps,” and Chapter 6, “Digital Painting
Color Maps,” dealt with work similar to more traditional art, this chapter once again
enters the realm of technical art. Indeed, creating a rig is perhaps one of the most techni-
cal parts of the 3D asset creation process.
Rigging is not just a process of making a model movable; it involves precisely naming
and organizing the relationships between parts of the rig, called bones . Bones can be set
to interact with specific vertices in a mesh so that when the rig is posed, the mesh follows.
Bones can also be given constraints in how
they move and interact with one another.
These constraints give bones specific behav-
iors that allow for a variety of animation pos-
sibilities. In this way, understanding proper
rigging techniques will put you on the path
to creating a myriad of visually compelling
animations.
Like the differences between modeling
for animations and games, however, differ-
ences exist between models built for anima-
tions and those built for real time-rendered
environments.
Figure 7.1
Rigging allows you
to pose characters
in any way you wish.
Animation Rigs vs. Game Rigs
Like models, rigs have their own sets of limitations when being used for games instead of
traditional animation. Like animation models, animation rigs can be complex and feature
more parts than their videogame counterparts. The Rigify add-on introduced in Blender 2.5
is an example of such a rig (Figure 7.2).
Figure 7.2 shows what the zombie looks like rigged with the Rigify armature. This fully
featured rig has hundreds of bones and is capable of creating some excellent animations
with simple commands. It is also prebuilt, so animators do not have to go through the
hassle of creating their own custom rig. However, there is a definite drawback to using
this armature for game characters.
Search WWH ::




Custom Search