Notes from Rigging Hell

Some things I learned this week against my will:

1) You can never over-estimate the time you think rigging will take, even if you're really good at it, even if you enjoy it, even if you've rigged a bunch of characters before. It doesn't matter. It always, always, always takes longer.

2) Many talented riggers out there post tutorials and provide insightful comments. They are not always right.

3) Sometimes the thing you think was broken is actually fine -- but something else is broken, and it's something you'll never suspect.

4) Putting extra joints into your rig to improve deformations -- good. Maya's handling of rotate orders once you start doing that -- bad!

At some point I'm going to have to drop a thank-you e-mail to Dave Walden, a rigger at Blue Sky who I have not yet met or ever communicated with, but whose skinning tools and posts on CG talk have helped out a ton this week -- as well as his awesome character demo on his website that inspired me to put squashy eyes back onto my list of must-haves.

Meanwhile, I am definitely off-schedule, and have been working 16-20 hour days to rectify the situation. I'm hoping to be caught up by next week -- just in time for my FIRST PANEL REVIEW.

Also, while I'm on the rigging topic, a technical note for myself -- I noticed Maya wasn't updating its nodes properly and was screwing up the rotations in my characters wrists. The symptoms were the wrist not updating its position from the control skeleton when rotation values were being typed into the channel box -- but using the rotate controller or flipping IK/FK would force it to re-evaluate. I solved this by deleting the direct connection between the control wrist and the skinning wrist, and constraining it with an Orient Constraint instead. This forces the wrist to maintain the appropriate position. Remember this in case the same thing starts happening to the other arm joints.