minning.de - Stefan Minning: CG Artist and Developer

So today I made front­page on CGTalk with my Demo Reel! I was pretty amazed com­ing into the office hav­ing every­one con­grat­u­late me, mainly because my col­league Reed Casey had just had his reel plugged and I didn’t think they’d do it again for me, show­ing off lots of the same work that he already had on his.

Any­way, I’m pretty thrilled to say the least:

Ok, so I’ll admit it: I’m not a very good char­ac­ter rig­ger. Sure, I know the basics, but the process of set­ting up a char­ac­ter for ani­ma­tion just isn’t one of the things I enjoy doing… too much trial and error for my taste.
Set­ting up Bagel 2 wasn’t much of a chal­lenge and so I got away with a sim­ple sys­tem so clumsy it would prob­a­bly bring tears to the eyes of an expe­ri­enced rig­ger… and set­ting up a dragon is a whole dif­fer­ent beast altogether!

But since my main char­ac­ter model, the dragon Tatsu, is almost fin­ished, I was look­ing for (prefer­ably free!) tools to assist me in rig­ging the lit­tle guy. My quest on CGTalk and High­End 3D yielded results fairly quickly — here’s what I’ve been able to dig up, so far:

• Crea­ture Tools
  Crea­ture Tools is a free tool new to me, but nonethe­less very inter­est­ing. The intu­itive ani­ma­tion sys­tem and some of the other bonus fea­tures look useful!
• Final­Rig
  This one I’ve had the plea­sure of using before, and I remem­ber hav­ing a lot of fun play­ing with the “stretchy IK” fea­tures, allow­ing for a very toony style of ani­ma­tion. Seems tech­ni­cally mature and quite sta­ble. A bonus is the out-​​of-​​the-​​box sup­port for a tail (and wings), which could save me a lot of time. Plus, it’s free!
• ani­Man
  Here’s another free rig­ging tool, but unfor­tu­nately the producer’s site hasn’t been acces­si­ble for what seems like for­ever. The sys­tem itself feels solid enough and the feature-​​set is impressive!
• Char­ac­ter Stu­dio for Maya
  This one looks like a Chi­nese hack to bring 3ds max Char­ac­ter Stu­dio–like fea­tures to Maya. Appar­ently there’s no offi­cial home­page or any­thing of the sort and the whole thing feels a bit flaky… I’m stay­ing away from this one!
• The Setup Machine
  The Setup Machine is the first non-​​free solu­tion I tried. Its fea­tures include builtin sup­port for quadrupeds, cen­taurs (!) and ten­ta­cles… noth­ing I’d par­tic­u­larly require. Still, sup­port for long necks and tails could come in handy. The boxy char­ac­ter con­trols were a bit lack­ing, in my opinion.
• AdvancedSkele­ton
  Ani­ma­tion Stu­dios of Syd­ney, Aus­tralia, offer a trial ver­sion of their rel­a­tively expen­sive rig­ging solu­tion, AdvancedSkele­ton. Play­ing with the eval­u­a­tion ver­sion, I must say that of all the sys­tems I tested, this is the one I liked least. It sports a vast feature-​​set, but over­all it actu­ally felt less sophis­ti­cated than some of the free alternatives.

Then of course there are inde­pen­dent prod­ucts such as Motion­builder or messiah:animate, which are both out of the ques­tion at the moment due to their pric­ing.
So right now I’m lean­ing towards Final­Rig 1.2, mainly because of the inte­grated tail and also because I’ve used it in the past and am hence famil­iar with some of its quirks and their workarounds.

Should you have any other sug­ges­tions, I’d be happy to hear them!