How to interact with an ephmeral rig

As I’ve implemented the new ephemeral rig system, I’ve thought a lot about what the best way to interact with it is. While the system supports setting any given control to be driven by any other control using any of the constraints I’ve implemented (more on that later), defining these on a case-by-case basis is not a great way to interact with a character. As I discussed in an earlier post, The Animation Core Loop, fiddling with settings isn’t what you want to be thinking about when you’re animating a character, and setting interactions on a control-by-control basis adds too many extra steps to the “core loop” of animation.

One way to handle this would be to have a bunch of presets, like different “rigs” you can switch the character to, but this doesn’t really take advantage of the flexibility of ephemeral rigging. So I’ve been working on trying to figure out an interaction scheme that has a limited number of settings to mess with, but gives you a wide range of possible rig behaviors out of those limited settings. What I have right now is what I’m calling “directional manipulation.”

In this model, you have three primary interaction modes, “Forward,” “Backward,” and the default. When in a default state, the rig supports mostly free interaction, except for knees and elbows which more or may not be “suspended,” my non-IK version of IK. Forward drives things down the chain from the current control--in the simplest case, this is just FK--and backwards drives things up the chain. You can use both at once to drive both sides. The system can act on a limb or a character level, and has a couple of other settings--like rotation isolation, and suspension--that can be turned on or off. You can get a surprising amount of rig behavior out of this basic idea. For instance, a reverse foot is simply manipulating the foot backwards in limb mode--something you can just as easily do with a spine to swing the hips around.

It unifies a lot of rig interaction ideas into a few manipulation settings, which I think is the best way to think about interacting with the rig--not “this is what this control is set to” but “this is how I want to interact right now.” In my previous videos, I used hotkeys to activate or deactivate the various manipulation options. Now I’m experimenting with using a custom marking menu. I’m not sure which will be better in practice--some experimentation while animating will be necessary to reveal that.

It’s not perfect yet--for instance, Backwards works perfectly well on knees and elbows, but doesn’t do anything all that useful!

You’d probably want to have it move the torso in this case, which is completely doable but means implementing a special case so the torso can recognize which of its possible children it should be attaching itself to correctly, much like the system I already have to make sure the graph passes through paired controls in the right direction. Since this is an unusual case it’s not top priority for me right now but it’s how I think things should work eventually.

There are also three other settings that globally affect the behavior of all controls, however they are being interacted with. “Suspended” turns on and off the suspend behavior of elbows, knees, and the intermediate tail controls.

“Rotation Isolation” globally effects whether certain controls--such as hips, shoulders, and head--maintain their orientation when affected by other controls.

Finally, “Head Free” is my one concession to a control-specific setting. Sometimes you’d want the head to move with the torso, other times you’d want it to be free. But unlike the “Suspended” mode, which effects a bunch of different controls, there’s only one head.

This isn’t really a finished concept--as I animate with this system, I hope I’ll be able to find an even simpler scheme to use to globally affect the rig that requires fewer settings, but this already feels a lot smoother to interact with then my earlier attempts.