Re: automated character rig

["John Clark" <john.clark23(at)ntlworld.com>]

Very interesting. I agree with you that it seems a little dated and (again like you) I'm naturally inclined to use something that gets you along way there out of the box and provides some common standard, but what are the quirks and anomolies that you mention? 
I think the interesting thing about the xsi rig is that its never recieved a single tweak (that I'm aware of) since its first release ages ago. I was begining to wonder whether thats because nobody uses it in production so there was no great clamour to develop it. Or perhaps its just that rigging is one of those things that people just like to do themselves. We've invested huge ammount of time at work (sony) on rigs and supporting tech and I'm not convinced that the results are that much better than any other 3rd party rig out there except that its ours!

cheers

John

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 9:07 PM, David Barosin <dbarosin(at)gmail.com> wrote:

I think the XSI rig is a good starting point for many situations.  We've built up a couple mocap pipelines using the character toolkit as a launching point.  The animators are happy because the don't have to get familiar with a new rig and the toolset is decent enough to not want to rewrite the entire thing.   It's also nice to know that the rigging tools are standard with every seat of XSI so if you find yourself freelancing at different companies you aren't ham-stringed by not having a proprietary (or third party) rig.

The rig itself is a bit dated compared to some of the more recent rigging tricks I've seen and there are a couple minor quirks, oddities, and anomalies that you learn about about along the way. Overall though it's a lot easier than having to roll your own.   Another plus is that MOTOR seems to prefer the XSI rig structure. 

On Mon, Mar 31, 2008 at 3:31 PM, John Clark <john.clark23(at)ntlworld.com> wrote: