New Rigs: To Modify or Build From Scratch

[jayfaker]

Hey everyone,

I have a character I just finished rigging, and I'm moving on to the next character that is similar, but shorter. So I decided to try to modify the rig instead of build it from scratch. But I've ended up having to delete all the actions anyway, and now there are quite a few bugs happening, like the rig disappearing visually when I try to add actions to the old smart bones. Everything reappears when click and drag the invisible bone, but it still concerns me. So here's my question:

How many of you reuse rigs for multiple characters? Do you have any tips, best practices, lists of gotchas for doing so?
How many of you prefer to just start from scratch each time?

Thanks!

Jim

[MrMiracle77]

The only time I've been able to successfully re-use an entire rig is when it's just a basic re-color, or change a logo that has the same location on Rig B as it does on Rig A. I have blurry 'background character rigs' that were made this way.

I do have a 'standardized mouth' that I use on most of my rigs. It can be safely re-sized based on the shape of the face, but I do have to go into lower layers to manipulate it. There are users who dislike nested bone layers, but I'm fine with it for smaller parts that use standardized poses like mouths and hands.

You can pre-build some bone rigs to re-use across multiple rigs. For example, my "basic face" has the root bone, eyes u/d, eyes l/r, upper eyelid, lower eyelid, eyebrows, face l/r, and face u/d. This doesn't automatically create the associated smart movements, but it saves me the time of having to re-draw and zero-weight the bones I use every time. I just drag the face layers in, do some minor re-positioning of the bones, and get started on smart movements.

[Greenlaw]

I sometimes work from a few template files for certain character types and modify them as needed. This saves me from doing common tasks like building a standard skeleton with controls, and naming layers, bones, actions, etc. This allows me to focus more on creating the artwork and figuring out any unique features for this specific character.

Most of the time, though, I just work from scratch. After you've done this for awhile, it's not that big a deal.

That said, in some productions where the character designs are similar between characters, I have repurposed rigs and mainly just replaced the artwork in the rigs. If the character artwork is mostly Moho vectors, it's probably going to require re-doing the Actions that move points. If it's bitmap art, the mesh layers will probably need to be remade. Either way the existing Smart Bones should be fine and I only need to change the keyframes for the artwork animation. Other Smart Bones in the rig mainly just push bones around for turns and such, and may need repositioning if the design calls for it.

Unless the character design is radically different from the rig's original character art, I haven't seen any problems with doing this, but here are a couple of things to be aware of:

1. Avoid unparenting Smart Bones as this can break the Actions. What usually happens it that unparenting the bones will change to rotation of bones and create an offset that can lock up or otherwise break your controls. If you need to move the bones, instead of unparenting you should reparent to bone that has the same rotation and hierarchy...will will preserve the original rotations and keep the actions from breaking. If you happen to break the Actions like this, it's usually easier to clear the keys and reset them rather than trying to fix the errors.

2. If you use the same custom Styles but want to change their appearance, you will want to import the rig and enable the Unlink Shared Styles option. Otherwise, you're going to run into a custom Styles conflict when the two characters are used in the same project file.

These things are especially important when you're moving parts from one rig to another.

BTW, there's a script by MultRush that prevents a lot of problems that can arise when repurposing rigs and rig parts called MR Transform Rig Tool. I haven't used it in production yet but it's very promising in the tests I've done. Based on what I'm seeing so far, I really wish I had this script when I worked on the original Boss Baby series. We had to make complete costume changes for the rigs for nearly every episode!

[jayfaker]

BTW, there's a script by MultRush that prevents a lot of problems that can arise when repurposing rigs and rig parts called MR Transform Rig Tool.

Whoa, that's a nice looking tool. Thanks for sharing! And thanks for the tips!

Jim

[scottmayhew]

I sometimes work from a few template files for certain character types and modify them as needed. This saves me from doing common tasks like building a standard skeleton with controls, and naming layers, bones, actions, etc. This allows me to focus more on creating the artwork and figuring out any unique features for this specific character.

Most of the time, though, I just work from scratch. After you've done this for awhile, it's not that big a deal.

That said, in some productions where the character designs are similar between characters, I have repurposed rigs and mainly just replaced the artwork in the rigs. If the character artwork is mostly Moho vectors, it's probably going to require re-doing the Actions that move points. If it's bitmap art, the mesh layers will probably need to be remade. Either way the existing Smart Bones should be fine and I only need to change the keyframes for the artwork animation. Other Smart Bones in the rig mainly just push bones around for turns and such, and may need repositioning if the design calls for it.

Unless the character design is radically different from the rig's original character art, I haven't seen any problems with doing this, but here are a couple of things to be aware of:

1. Avoid unparenting Smart Bones as this can break the Actions. What usually happens it that unparenting the bones will change to rotation of bones and create an offset that can lock up or otherwise break your controls. If you need to move the bones, instead of unparenting you should reparent to bone that has the same rotation and hierarchy...will will preserve the original rotations and keep the actions from breaking. If you happen to break the Actions like this, it's usually easier to clear the keys and reset them rather than trying to fix the errors.

2. If you use the same custom Styles but want to change their appearance, you will want to import the rig and enable the Unlink Shared Styles option. Otherwise, you're going to run into a custom Styles conflict when the two characters are used in the same project file.

These things are especially important when you're moving parts from one rig to another.

BTW, there's a script by MultRush that prevents a lot of problems that can arise when repurposing rigs and rig parts called MR Transform Rig Tool. I haven't used it in production yet but it's very promising in the tests I've done. Based on what I'm seeing so far, I really wish I had this script when I worked on the original Boss Baby series. We had to make complete costume changes for the rigs for nearly every episode!

Hello! Really appreciate all your knowledgable posts and responses!
I am new to Moho, did a quick search through the forum, but haven't found a succinct answer for my question. I want to set up a rig, animate that rig, then swap out the bitmap layers for variants to reuse the rig and animation via the psd file. Is there an easy way to do that? In other posts youve mentioned ID tags. Would the be obliterated by simply swapping out the layers in photoshop with new art? Is there a way to use an already authored rig as a reference and within Moho swap out the psd artwork?

thanks so much
Scott

[Greenlaw]

In other posts youve mentioned ID tags...

Hi, scottmayhew,

I think my post in your other thread answers some of your question, but regarding Layer IDs...

In Moho 12.5 and ealier, layer IDs could be problematic when using layered PSD files. This is because whenever I created new layers, or merged or deleted layers in the paint program, the layer IDs would change and break the layer connections in Moho.

But ever since Moho 13.5, Moho has been giving preference to layer names to identity layers, and using layer IDs as a secondary identifier. So, if you're diligent about clearly naming layers in your paint program, everything should be fine. Moho 14.2, continued to improve on layered PSD support, and I use layered PSD most of the time now for bitmap art in Moho.

Tip: Use short, clear identifiers when naming paint program layers, and keep the naming convention consistent throughout your production. It's still possible to break the layered PSD system, but this happens mainly through carelessness.

Hope this helps.

[scottmayhew]

In other posts youve mentioned ID tags...

Hi, scottmayhew,

I think my post in your other thread answers some of your question, but regarding Layer IDs...

In Moho 12.5 and ealier, layer IDs could be problematic when using layered PSD files. This is because whenever I created new layers, or merged or deleted layers in the paint program, the layer IDs would change and break the layer connections in Moho.

But ever since Moho 13.5, Moho has been giving preference to layer names to identity layers, and using layer IDs as a secondary identifier. So, if you're diligent about clearly naming layers in your paint program, everything should be fine. Moho 14.2, continued to improve on layered PSD support, and I use layered PSD most of the time now for bitmap art in Moho.

Tip: Use short, clear identifiers when naming paint program layers, and keep the naming convention consistent throughout your production. It's still possible to break the layered PSD system, but this happens mainly through carelessness.

Hope this helps.

VERY informative! Thank you!