Sometimes you just need to get something done and get it done quickly. This is what we will look at today, Skinning Vs Rigging. Skinning is a bit easier, most times faster and simpler than AccuRIG. While AccuRIG is a powerful tool for skinning bipedal characters it can be a bit tricky when pushed outside of that box, but it can be done with enough effort if one needs the masking feature.
One of the biggest problems with using AccuRIG for a non-bipedal, “sort of character” or basically a block of mesh that some body parts defined but not all are usable, is a proper pivot point. Depending on where the mesh comes from or how it was created it may never have been given an appropriate pivot or worse the pivot is off from the center of the body because an arm is pointing outward like the example we will be using in this article.
This type of pose will naturally put the pivot in the center of the entire mesh, not just the bottom and between the legs. Odd pivots and other ways the mesh was made can make it very difficult for AccuRIG to properly place the markers on the mesh. It can also take a long time to create those markers even though they aren’t in optimal locations. If the mesh has proper clean topology this is not a problem, but statues are not made with animation in mind.
The best we can do is determine what limbs we think we can rig or skin and how we can accomplish that task in Character Creator 4. In this case it wasn’t rigging with AccuRIG but rather skinning the statue to the mesh as a cloth then using the Hide Mesh tool to hide the body.
AccuRIG Not the Best Choice for this Task
As I said earlier rigging a non-bipedal mesh is tricky and will take longer and sometimes it can be a lot of work for a result no better than simple cloth skinning. This is not the fault of AccuRIG as it simply wasn’t made for this task but that doesn’t mean we won’t try. In the tutorial at the end, I start with a sped-up clip of the failed AccuRIG process along with my narration.
It took a long time for AccuRIG to place the initial markers on the statue mesh as it has few discernable limbs and only two that are not connected to the rest of the mesh. This is the arm and head which is all we need to animate. As you will see in the embedded tutorial, AccuRIG didn’t like my edited marker placement and widened out the skeleton to comical proportions.
Even with masking enabled I could not get decent movement from the arm or the head as they were not lined up properly with the bones, basically disregarding most of manual marker placement. To top this off the skeleton jumped around refusing to stay centered on the mesh. This made animating the arm and the head very problematic as the pivots were way off and caused unusable mesh deformations due to the poor rigging.
Like I said earlier, AccuRIG was given the task of almost having to rig a mesh brick making it very difficult to create proper rigging envelopes. The skeleton jumping out of place during skinning was the nail in the coffin because I knew I could try skinning and didn’t need to try again with rigging.
Skinning is Our Friend
Skinning is so much easier in this instance that it’s almost comical and this isn’t the only instance skinning will be better than rigging. It mainly depends on if the arms and legs have enough separation from the body or rest of the mesh to be skinned properly. The tolerances are much more forgiving for cloth skinning because again, we are only looking to animate certain parts of the mesh.
After we load the statue mesh as a prop, we can then load a character. In this case I chose the base Neutral Male. Again, the tutorial goes through all of this in more detail but all we have to do next is pose the Character as near as we can to the pose of the Statue. Then we move the character over to better align it with the statue.
After we have posed and placed the character nearer to the statue mesh, we can:
- Select the Statue Mesh
- ATTACH the Statue Mesh to the Character (this activates the Transfer Skin weights choice)
Skin the Statue Mesh as an “Other” cloth (I didn’t try any of the other choices)
- Use the HIDE MESH tool after skinning to hide ALL of the body parts of the character mesh
- Delete what unneeded features of the CC mesh as necessary
- Turn off the visibility of the Tongue
It is VERY IMPORTANT that we set the DEFAULT POSE in the Pose Editor otherwise the bind pose will revert to an A Pose and the mesh will be distorted badly when saved as a character instead of the native statue pose we need to keep for use in iClone.
After saving the default pose, we can now transfer the character to iClone for a very simple keyframe animation of the arm and head. In fact, it is only a couple of keyframes. One each for the head and arm that can be on the same frame or different frame for variance. You can move down the timeline to your desired frame to rotate the head or move the arm to create an animation of the moving parts.
SUMMARY
Sometimes, as I said in the opening paragraph, you just need to get something done without taking several days to do it. There are times the animation calls for that much work, but, if you can figure out a way to skin for rig a static block of mesh like a statue that may be only partially defined, then you can add some nice touches or nuance to your scenes by animating objects that would generally be static or a more involved process just to move a couple of limbs.
If you need lip sync, expressions or anything like that then you have to resort to a more involved process that may or may not work in the long run depending on the statue mesh. Skinning is also a way to create quick prototypes or proof-of-concepts in the right situations.
Get creative and there is no telling what mesh you might be animating next with Character Creator and iClone.
MD McCallum – WarLord
Digital Artist MD “Mike” McCallum, aka WarLord, is a longtime iClone user. Having authored free tutorials for iClone in its early years and selected to write the iClone Beginners Guide from Packt Publishing in 2011, he was fortunate enough to meet and exchange tricks and tips with users from all over the world and loves to share this information with other users. He has authored hundreds of articles on iClone and digital art in general while reviewing some of the most popular software and hardware in the world. He has been published in many of the leading 3D online and print magazines while staying true to his biggest passion, 3D animation. For more information click here.
