Hello,

I am looking at animating with Maya as I would like to understand the animators workflow, but am being confused by what I am finding online.

I always thought a rig was a basic skeleton + additional information such as joint constraints/IK solver parameters/etc. When I search for rigs for Maya though I am finding what look like complete characters - they even come with hair and multiple outfits.

I am similarly confused by half the goals for this Kickstarter: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/cgmonks/morpheus-rig-v20 (i.e. why such a tool would need to come with its own props?)

What is the purpose of these 'complete' rigs that are more like characters than rigs? Are the artists meant to use them as an asset in their game or render? Or are they just to be used by the animator, and then the modeller will take the skeleton and skin the actual character mesh?

What is the term for what I thought was a rig?

Sj

You're likely to find as many definitions of "rig" as there are animation/modeling programs. I've even seen "rigs" for creating rigs. Only my opinion: I generally don't think of a rig as including the skeleton. It's a means to generate animation data for a given skeleton, intended to be simpler and/or more intuitive than rotating individual bones/joins/frames.

Are the artists meant to use them as an asset in their game or render? Or are they just to be used by the animator, and then the modeller will take the skeleton and skin the actual character mesh?

It's unlikely that a rig would be considered as an asset for the game itself. It's a means to create animation (asset) data, probably stored with the project for creating the app, but not likely to be distributed with it.

With regard to the entire process, it's recursive. Overall, the size of the mesh, number of bones, number of bone-weights, number of animation steps, etc., "should" be as small as will produce satisfactory results. A common sequence is: 1) create the character (mesh) 2) skin the character (add/adjust skeletal joints/bone-weights) 3) animate the character. During the animation phase, e.g., a "required" bending of an elbow results in an ugly crease. A decision is made whether to live with it, or change the "requirement," or change the bone-weights, or add another bone, or add another bone weight, or add a few more vertices, etc. Each of those decisions has a penalty.

I think of a rig for animation like wrapper code for libraries... they are a set of controls to carry out complex actions more simply, without needing to work exclusively with the lower-level implementation. Only instead of doing something with code it's doing character movements. It could be something as complex as making an entire character turn around realistically with one "lever", with waist and shoulder movement going along as secondary actions, or an inverse kinematics control (common in most 3D animation programs). It lets you move one end of a bone structure of a series of joints while moving all the joints along with it.

For all the systems I've worked with, a rig is the skeleton with the accompanying joints, constraints, and other tool-usable options and sliders. A rig is usually paired with at least one model in order to be useful, so it is often seen as a "rigged model". You typically need both the rig and model for animation.

Sometimes a rig is designed to be used by many models, as is the case with many vehicles or characters or animals. Other times they are created with only a single model in mind.

Are the artists meant to use them as an asset in their game or render? Or are they just to be used by the animator, and then the modeller will take the skeleton and skin the actual character mesh?

It's unlikely that a rig would be considered <snip>

I believe the OP is referring to the base mesh that comes with MorpheusRig2.0 (same concept from their previous version). The mesh is scaled similar to a MakeHuman workflow with advanced bone controls all wired up. Gets you right into working with the control rig to start scrubbing out your sequences instead of the tedious attaching/tweeking to get to an animation ready state.

Also, the animator can go to work (with the built in proxy, if you will) before the modeler is finished with the mesh.
Then the animation data could be swapped over to a closely shaped refined version.
Cool project for the Maya users.

Thanks for the replies! They are much appreciated and are all very helpful! I have much to learn about the animators workflow but its a lot better now I can see the use cases of the tools I am looking at.