Interactive Rigging with Intuitive Tools

Abstract

Rigging is a core element in the process of bringing a 3D character to life. The rig defines and delimits the motions of the character and provides an interface for an animator with which to interact with the 3D character. The quality of the rig has a key impact on the expressiveness of the character. Creating a usable, rich, production ready rig is a laborious task requiring direct intervention by a trained professional because the goal is difficult to achieve with fully automatic methods. We propose a semi-automatic rigging editing framework which eases the need for manual intervention while maintaining an important degree of control over the final rig. Starting by automatically generated base rig, we provide interactive operations which efficiently configure the skeleton structure and mesh skinning.