For a long time people having been asking for a Rigging DVD. The wait is over, well sort of. The Advanced Character Rigging tutorial DVD that come with Release 10.5 is by WiPix a French animation company that includes well known and highly regarded CINEMA 4D Character Animator Clement Vaucelle aka Kiteman. Some of the rigged characters that came with Release 10.0 are by Clement. If you haven´t stopped by their site then you should drop by and check out some of the animations. You´ll get to see an awesome animation of the Rabbit character used in the tutorial plus some other cool animations.
The DVD comprises 11 video tutorials totalling 5 hours and 25 minutes approximately. The videos are in avi format at 1024 x 768 resolution and use the Techsmith lossless codec. This means the video quality is very high but the file sizes are pretty hefty which isn´t an issue coming on a DVD. Unfortunately the audio quality isn´t as good as it could be and I think the author or MAXON should have used higher quality audio settings. This wouldn´t have had much impact upon the file size. Possibly part of the problem is the microphone used. I don´t know. The audio is okay to listen to but not crystal clear like the Cactus Dan rigging tutorials or 3DFluff tutorial DVD´s are. I should also mention that the tutorial author is not a native English speaker but his English is quite good although a little hard to listen to at times because of the distortion in the audio combined with how he pronounces words. The author uses the Dark scheme which although I don´t particularly like is at least easier to see than the default Light scheme where I find things like selected points and parameters are hard to make out. Here is a screen grab from tutorial 11.
|
The DVD is in 11 chapters. Scene files for each chapter are supplied. Chapter 1 includes a VRay version scene file. We´ll have a brief look at each chapter
This is a mainly a rigging DVD so we start off in the first chapter with the supplied Rabbit scene file. The Rabbit is textured and ready to rig. Clement starts off by discussing the model to be animated and the importance of edge loops for proper deformation. It might have been useful to explain and show what an edge loop is as I doubt beginners would know what they are.
 |
Rabbit ready to rig |
We then rip straight into creating the joints for the legs and symmetry is used so that both legs are created at the same time. The author usually says what keys to press when doing things but never mentioned to hold down the Ctrl key to create joints when using the joint tool. By the end of this video the rabbit has all of the joints created ready for the IK and attaching to the mesh.
The tutorial carries on and the author rips straight into adding IK to the legs. This is good stuff but the author doesn´t explain very often why things are done or what things are. You have to watch carefully as he sometimes does something without saying anything. I think that beginners will struggle to follow this chapter and it´s probably one best suited to people who have had a go at rigging and now want to create a more advanced leg rig. I think a useful addition to the DVD would have been a pre tutorial on what solvers, goal objects, up vectors etc are as you aren´t told. User data sliders and XPresso are used to control the toes and feet as per the short movie here.
User data sliders to control foot |
Things carry on from the author left off in the previous chapter. He uses a Spline IK setup for the spine joints. This is really good but again no real explanation is given about why we should use a Spline / Spline IK setup. I would actually recommend people buy Anson Call´s Cinema 4D 10 Handbook for good explanations on this and other things. Work through the rigging tutorials in that book and you would probably find following this tutorial DVD a lot easier. Controllers for the head joints are set up. The tail is setup with user data sliders and XPresso so that as one joint is rotated the child joints also rotate.
Again this tutorial carries on from the last one but like some of the other videos the author says that he has changed the names and positions of a few of the things in the Object Manager. Some people closely following the tutorial may find this a little disconcerting but you can check your own scene against the supplied scene files. In this video, IK is set up for the arms and hands. The hand joints are outside of the arm hierarchy and Squash and Stretch is enabled on the arm IK tag. The hand joints are connected to the arm by way of a constraint tag. This then allows the arms to stretch but the hands remain a constant size.
The legs are split into multiple bones / joints using the joint tool. This is to make the legs more flexible and cartoon like. A similar steup that was used on the spine with Spline IK is used. A delay is setup so that the leg flexes as the foot controller moves around. To further control the bend, a user data slider is setup that changes the shape of the spline. Very slick and the sort of advanced stuff that many people are looking how to do. Bendy IK similar to the legs is done on the arms. I should mention here that if you plan on duplicating what you see in the videos you´ll probably have to replay the videos quite a few times. Having a second monitor or playing the videos on a laptop would be a definite advantage.
A short video for a change. The IK and controller is set up for the head.
Yes folks, 44 minutes on rigging ears!! The reason is the ears have 2 different joint rigs depending on what you want to do, Soft IK and Spline IK. A third chain of joints is used and these joints are hooked up with constraints and XPresso so that you can move between Soft IK and the Spline IK. Soft IK is used to make the ears flop around as the rabbit moves and Spline IK is used when we want more control over posing the ears. It´s this third chain of joints that is attached to mesh. After the brief outline of the video the tutorial author goes through an example in a new scene with 3 simple joint chains using the various IK´s. We then come back and set things up on the ears. This is very clever and the sort of thing more experienced users are looking for but I doubt beginners will be able to follow this as the author moves pretty quick like he generally does. Here is an animation done by me showing going between Soft IK and Spline IK. You can see the 3 controls that you have for each ear.
Going between Soft IK and Spline IK |
Now that the IK etc is finished we finally get to attaching the skin (mesh) of the rabbit to the joints. This video begins with a quick introduction and then a simple example of using cylinders is demonstrated for about half of the video. A couple of good tips like the Mouse Over and Auto Normalize options on the Weight tool are demonstrated. We´re shown how to use the Weight tool Symmetry option as this is a huges time saver and ensures both sides of the rig are weighted the same. After the cylinder example the tutorial shows creating a skin object and weight tag. Joints are manually added in and then auto weighting is applied. We aren´t shown editing the weighting as this was done in the example. Here´s a look at the weighted rabbit. I have to add that weighting is a lot better now in Mocca 3.1 than the old Claude Bonet tool from Mocca 1 and 2.
 |
Rabbit character with weights |
The video shows how to set up the facial morphs but it doesn´t show setting them all up. I guess because of the sheer time involved in doing each one. Clement shows using the brush tool to create a smile pose on the right hand side of the face. He then shows how to use the flip right click option to mirror the smile from the right hand side of the face to the left hand side. He then shows creating a third morph by using the Edit in place option where the third morph is created from the 2 smile morphs. Excellent stuff. By default going from the reference morph pose to another morph, the points move in a linear fashion. This isn´t always desirable for things like eyelids and mouth so Clement goes through a simple example and shows how to make the movement rotational. We´re then shown all of the finished morphs and the results are excellent.
The second part of the video is about XPresso with the morphs and wasn´t really a tutorial more an overview of what the author had done. Here he uses user data and XPresso to create sliders that control the morphs. The idea being to mix say the upper eyelid and bottom eyelid closing all in the one slider. Here´s an animation by me having a bit fun creating a Bad Bunny.
Facial animation with morph / user data sliders |
If you thought the previous chapter´s morph sliders were enough, think again. Even more control and variety of facial expressions can be added by using Free Form Deformers (FFD´s). For squash and stretching things like eyes these are a lot easier to use than creating morphs by moving points around. Clement creates a whole lot of FFD´s and uses them with a number of Posemixer objects. He shows us how to restrict the influence of the FFD using restriction tags, point selection tags and vertex maps. The vertex maps are used on the head mesh and he uses the live selection tool in vertex painting mode. It was a pity he didn´t demonstrate the new Paint Tool for creating vertex maps. It would have saved a bit of work as the tool has a symmetry painting mode.
This is probably the best explained video on the whole DVD.
This is the final video on the DVD and is all about fine tuning the walk cycle in the timeline and mainly in F-Curve mode. We´re not actually shown creating the walk cycle which is a real pity as this is something many people want tutorials for. Below is the final walk cycle from the final video but with fur disabled.
Final walk cycle |
It´s hard to describe this tutorial DVD. On the one hand the tutorial author clearly knows his stuff and a beautifully rigged character is put together and I am sure many people will benefit from it. On the other hand I felt as though I wasn´t really watching a tutorial, more a "Watch me as I work" video with an audio commentary. If you are looking for good explanations of how and why things are done then the DVD misses out in a major way although to be fair a few things are explained quite well like weight editing. This would have been a superb DVD if things had been explained in a similar manner to how Cactus Dan explains things in his series of rigging tutorials here. Sadly they aren´t. I guess this leaves a golden opportunity for someone to make a comprehensive Rigging / Character Animation tutorial DVD. The audio quality as I´ve mentioned really wasn´t up to what you would expect of a commercial quality training DVD and made following the videos all that much harder especially as the tutorial author isn´t a native English speaker. However I´m glad 10.5 came with this tutorial DVD and I did learn a few things and I´m keen to do more character animation. What I would really love to see is a Part 2 DVD where the author shows how to do the full animation that he made with the rabbit here (Look on the 3D Animation page).