I'm finally developing a deep, abiding, painful understanding of what "rigging" as opposed to "skinning"

It's fun! ControlRig makes this shit so good, and animating in Unreal is going to be great!

But.

I will never type "skinning/rigging" like they're basically the same task, EVER, again. #UE5 #GameDev

@glassbottommeg Wait, what? I've rigged/skinned dozens of models in my career (admittedly, though, not well). What's the difference?

@LouisIngenthron skinning is bone weighting.

Rigging is the building of the incredibly complicated stack of controls and logic you need to then animate it.

Many (most) people use an auto-rigger at this point, so they don't even think about the rigging step. Which is basically good, because without an auto rigger it gets INCREDIBLY dense.

@glassbottommeg

> building of the incredibly complicated stack of controls and logic you need to then animate it

Are you talking about things like setting joint rotation limits and setting up inverse kinematics?

@LouisIngenthron yep, but a fully kitted out rig has a bunch more than that. Curl controls on each finger, fancy toe stuff if your skelly has toes, spinal IK and curl stuff, and it all needs to flip transparently between IK and FK mode, even if you key the IK / FK toggle to change mid-anim.

@glassbottommeg Gotcha. Been a while since I've worked on a project with good enough art to necessitate such sophisticated rigs.

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