Animador 3D

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

GDC 2011. Jeremy Ernst. Fast and Efficient Facial Rigging(in Gears of War 3)

Fast and Efficient Facial Rigging
in Gears of War 3
Character Rigger: -creates animation control rigs -creates animation pipeline toolsets -skin weights character models -set up character assets in game

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

My name is Jeremy Ernst and I am the characterrigger/technical animator at Epic Games. TAs are an interesting position, since we tend to bridge the gaps in a pipeline between art and code. I do a fair bit of programming, for various pipeline tools as well as rigging tools. If Iʼm not coding, Iʼm rigging, skin weighting, or solving problems.

Fast and Efficient Facial Rigging
in Gears of War 3

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

This talk is aboutthe facial rigging pipeline toolset I created for production on Gears of War 3. It is not a talk about the Unreal Engine, and it does except a certain level of familiarity with common rigging terminology.

Developing the Face Rig
Development Challenges: More characters than ever! Double the amount of cinematics

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

When developing this toolset, there were two maindevelopment challenges for me to consider. We have more characters than ever in this game. Delta squad grew pretty big in the story, and we also have four player co-op. Also, the scope of our cinematics increased drastically. Not only in length, but in the amount of minimum characters in each one. So I needed to make a toolset that allowed the animators to work quickly, but achieve high qualityresults.

Developing the Face Rig
Easy to Animate

Establish good workflow with outsourcers Transferable Rig and Data

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

So these were the 3 main things I wanted to achieve with this facial rigging toolset. Easy to animate is self-explanatory, but also hard to do. Establishing a solid workflow with outsourcers is important as well. The biggest point there isconsistency. Making sure that all of your internal animators stay on character with their posing, as well as the external animators. If you can build an easy way to deal with this into the rig, you increase the chances of getting back high quality data. Making the rig transferable is important too, as I donʼt want to have to replicate my work over and over. But, scripting wasnʼt going to work 100% for thisrig, and youʼll see why.

Easy to Animate

Animate Attributes, not Transformations

Nice, Clean, Curve data(1 channel/attribute)

So Clean!

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

So, the first step in getting this rig easy to animate was to have them animating attributes as much as possible, instead of individual joint transformations. That is going to give you nice, clean curves in your grapheditor as well. Also, less curves to deal with, since youʼd only have 1 channel per attribute instead of 6 per joint.

Easy to Animate

Animate Attributes, not Transformations

Nice, Clean, Curve data

Offset Rig - A Combination Rig

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

But, it became apparent that animating only attributes would not offer enough control. You could probably add a lot moreattributes until this was possible, but then you start to veer off making it easy to animate as well. So I added the offset rig, which allows the animator more control, but in a unique way.

Establishing a Good Workflow with Outsourcers

Getting back cleaner data

Staying on character with posing

Good ways to send all the files needed

Wednesday, March 30, 2011

Establishing a GoodWorkflow with Outsourcers

http://www.sminstall.com/
Wednesday, March 30, 2011

One of the things I started doing internally was packaging all of the scripts, icons and such into executables instead of just putting them up in source control and hoping everyone read the emails or copied files to the correct directories. This becomes even trickier when a producer just sends a .zip of all your files...