[Bf-funboard] Empties in the bone hierarchy

[joe]

On Mon, Mar 30, 2009 at 8:37 PM, Nathan Vegdahl <cessen at cessen.com> wrote:
> (joe)
>> Bone shapes are not a time problem, which any serious rigger will tell
>> you.
>
>   Eh... that's not entirely true.  It can take time to plan and
> execute good bone shapes for rig controls.  Compared to the rest of
> the rigging process it's certainly not a bottleneck.  But I also
> wouldn't say it's insignificant.

Depends on the person, I guess.  I think minimalistic ones are fairly
easy to do..

>
> (David Bryant)
>> So, most pro rig rig controls use simple controls (boxes,
>> circles,crosses,spheres).
>
>   Most professionally produced rigs use simple shapes because the
> riggers making them are either lazy, or are on too strict of deadlines
> to make good control shapes.
>   Sure, maybe 40-70% of the controls will make sense as simple
> shapes, depending on the rig.  But to really make the rig both
> visually clear and not visually overwhelming/cluttered, you have to
> carefully design the appearance of many of the controls.  Most rigs I
> see (including "pro" rigs from other packages and studios) fail hard
> on this.  Frankly, my BBB rigs fail pretty hard on this too.  I'm
> still learning.

Making controls nonoverwhelming isn't hard. . .and I don't think
making them clear is hard either.  Rigging controls give real-time
feedback, so they tend to be really easy to figure out (with the
exception of things like ik/fk blending controls)..  There's no need
to spend hours making super intuitive shapes.  Learning what a rig
control does isn't generally the hard part of learning a rig, seems to
me learning how the control layers are organized is more difficult
(e.g. which layer has what), and also learning what the original
intended workflows of the rig are.

>
>   That said, having presets for common bone shapes (with tweakable
> size+offsets) would be really handy, and would definitely speed up the
> process.
>   It would also be nice to be able to easily edit bone shapes in the
> position/size they end up on the bone.  This can probably be done with
> scripting, but it would be handy to have built-in.
>
> --Nathan V
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