Componentized rigging streams

Here’s our first two componentized rigging streams!

To be perfectly honest, the first one really doesn’t get to the point across very well—my head really wasn’t in the game when we did that one. The second one is much better and I backed up and explained some of the basic concepts again, so I actually recommend that people start with that one.

And here’s our third, which you can join at Tuesday at 5pm EST!

To do a brief explanation, componentized rigging is a way of creating a rig out of reusable components, rather then scripting an auto-rig system. Each of these components is just a Maya file that is referenced into your rig file. But critically, the component can only communicate with the rest of the rig through specific, predefined inputs and outputs.

That might sound like a strange way to rig, but it has huge advantages. Because each component depends wholly on it’s inputs to define its proportions, those proportions can be changed any any time, allowing you to reset a characters proportions without rebuilding the rig! And because each component presents a specific “interface” to the rest of the rig, you can trivially swap out different kinds of arms, for instance, without disturbing the rest of the rig at all. A componentized rigging system is also much, much easier to develop then a traditional auto-rigger.

Because Contour bones and joints make default states like “bone length” explicit, it’s extremely easy to do componentized rigging with Contour, and you can see that in the streams above if you can sit through all my digressions!

Our componentized system builds on the work of Raffaele Fragapane, who popularized the concept on Cult of Rig.