Week 7: Rigging/Kinematics - Ant rig

Rigging week was very interesting , but for me the most challenging week yet. You really need to think like an engineer and being really good at math doesn't hurt either. Maks, our instructor did a great job to trying to teach some tough material. My brain really hurt by the end of the week..haha. It is really fun though, trying to solve puzzles of how the get the relationship or control you want in skeleton or hierarchy.

In the above screen cap, I'm just showing a rig we worked on for class which is a skeleton for an ant, using IK (inverse kinematics) for the legs and FK (forward kinematics) for the spine. All IK means is that a chain of joints reacts/orients based on the placement of the end of the joint chain(effector). It's a quick method to pose arms and legs, but you lose the nice arcs you get with FK, like in the natural motion arcs of our arms and legs. FK, on the other hand, works by rotating the 'top' joint first (say the hip) and then then rotating the knee joint, then the ankle...etc. It's a lot of animating compared to IK. So much in fact, that IK is almost always done for a walk cycle.

It might be easier to see in the clip above. The legs of the ant are IK and the spine is FK. A good rig make the animator's job easier because he/she just have to move or animate a few controls and can access them easily. the circle's near the feet of the ant are an example of this.