rigging

A friend of mine just finished compiling these guidelines. Hope it helps.

A character TD from Image Metrics talks about various philosophies of facial rigging. He details the common mistakes seen in facial rigs, how they implement their solution while also working within the constraints of game engines and answers various questions posted by people watching online at the time of recording.

pretty cool Brad! I`m going to watch this later. I was actually wondering what and how guys in Image Metrics work. Looking forward to see all the parts.

This comes out of work I presented as a SIGGRAPH 97 Technical Sketch. The demo is mostly an experiment to isolate the minimal number of facial expression elements that will produce a "convincing" impression of character and personality. Of course this is just a subset of the full range of expression the human face is capable of. Paul Ekman's pioneering work on the Facial Action Coding System gives a functional description of the full range of expression of which the human face is capable.

I did send it a year a go, and have been looking at it off and on since it was created. As a simple base set of points it's wonderfully expressive and shows how much reads with so little adjusted. Head angle and noise plays a big part in this too.

I was playing with that. Very cool! It just shows the system, simplied as possible. What is "heas" angle?

that`s pretty cool!! guys, try to play with layers of skull, muscle etc.. really nice interface!

a bit rigging off-topic but hey... :) thanks to Gabriele for the link.

The Disney paper and video on "Efficient elasticity for character skinning with contact and collisions" is definitely worth a look. http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~sifakis/projects.html

MEL-Scripting & Maya API

Simple anatomy for the artist, decent reference and simplification.

Kinda cool

it`s just interesting how he describes the vector deltas, which are basically just blendShape. And pushing nearest points by that amount is like usual wrap. I just wasn`t getting why there is custom ICE network, maybe I missed something :) btw. I really liked the short "dog-boy" animation this guy did

It's a bit different to a wrap, more a delta look up and transfer, not a bind to of one bit of geo to another. As such you're only transferring relative motion and can manipulate that in different ways.

CG Papers and Abstracts Dealing with Muscles / Skin Deformation

Real world rigging.

early this year guys from Texas` Reel FX started online school for riggers. this has also facebook site here: http://www.facebook.com/RiggingMentorLLC

sweet, didn't know about the fb group...

blog about rigging spines

Superficial Anatomy Reference

also check out... http://cgclay.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00-08%3A00&max-results=1

deformation / articulation reference animations on a (3D) biped character.

oh hippydrome, nice website, shame it doesn`t get more updates...

nice tutorial about how to easily read and interpret a 3×3 Matrix (incl. video).

large collection of free maya rigs

Links to some decent anatomy reference.

looks again like basics, but could be useful to someone

A forum for and by technical artists in video-game development.