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Who is Josh Carey?
I am currently the Head of the Rigging Department at Reel FX Studios in Dallas, TX. My duties include managing my team of (currently) 8 riggers and cloth artists, supervising and rigging on projects, writing tools and evaluating workflows and efficiencies for both rigging and animation, and contributing knowledge, tools, workflow, etc to other departments in production. We usually run anywhere from 2-4 projects in parallel, so our dept is structured in a way where we can be efficient while not sacrificing quality. Work smarter, not harder, right?
In addition to having rigging experience, I have also been a Modeler as well as an Animator, and I believe this is the key to becoming an effective Rigger. You need to be able to know what a good mesh is and how it affects not only how well you can deform it, but how it will affect everything from animation to rendering. Rigging is at the front of the pipeline and should shoulder a good chunk of the responsibility for making sure a clean mesh and rig make its way through the pipe. You also need to know your client - the animator. Knowing their workflow, what they do and how they need to work, will really drive what you put into a rig. Unless you're also animating, you are making a rig for them, not yourself.
In addition to Rigging at work, I've also co-founded RiggingDojo.com, an online school for tech artists and riggers. Brad Clark and Chad Moore are the other co-founders, and we setup this online school as a way to give back our education of the 'tech art' in order to get more properly educated people out in the field. We also wanted to be able to find people that we wanted to hire, since we have found that is has been difficult finding the right tech artist / rigger to hire over the years.
Outside of the cg world, I am a cyclist. I find it extremely important to have an activity away from the computer to keep the mind fresh. Whether it is to clear my mind, de-stress, or a way to think about how to solve a particular rigging problem, getting on the bike is my solution to all of that. 8,000 miles in a year gets you a lot of stress relief and a lot of rigging solutions :)
Rigging is often not the first choice when people get into computer graphics. How did you get started with rigging?
I never planned on going into rigging, it just happened. I was actually planning on graduating with a modeling reel, but since I ended up with a whole bunch of models, I wanted to at least animate them a bit, so I needed to rig them. After doing 5 or so rigs and realizing that I enjoyed it more than I thought I would, I started to help other people with their rigs, and eventually that led to freelance work for rigging while I was still in school. I ended up graduating with a reel full of bland, non-textured models that were all modeled, rigged, and animated by myself. It was a bit of a mess thinking about it now, but there was a lot of self-discovery in doing all those rigs.
Rigging can be a lot of trail and error. What do you do to work faster?
Scripting. If you're going to do something more than once (and yes, you will be doing more than once), script it out. I do not remember hearing this advice when I first started, but once I started to actually do that, my efficiency increased. Once you feel comfortable doing "scripting" to automate things, then you start to tinker with actually developing tools and workflows around your efficiencies. It's all about taking tasks that you can automate and repeat, and turn them into a button click, or a mouse swipe. Once you do that, you'll have more time to concentrate on aesthetics or just making things *better*. You're always going to have trial and error. It's usually called R&D, and everyone at some point will have something they must throw away. As long as you can learn from a failed attempt, it isn't really a fail at all.
 
When you are struggling with a rig, what motivates you to go on?
Looking at great art. Classic cartoons, sketchbooks, famous paintings and sculptures, great student shorts, making of books... anything creative. I prefer to look at art over watching movies, but that isn't to say that I don't watch movies for inspiration too. I watched Rango again recently and I am still amazed at the ridiculously awesome job that everyone at ILM did on that film. Such detail, even down to a grain of sand.
I saw some of the impressive rigs on your website. How do you usually start out with these character?
A lot of what we've done in the past at Reel FX is take other companies IP's and make commercials or shorts with them. This means that we need to adapt and be able to imitate/replicate everything they've done with their rigs (and animation, rendering, etc). In these instances, we generally absorb as much footage of their movies as we can, trying to pinpoint joint locations, volume preservation tough-spots, key things that need to move during animation, etc.
As for the Looney Tunes shorts, we didn't have anyone to imitate other than the classic cartoons. Animators did an awesome job at grabbing frames from the cartoons and showing us specifically what poses they wanted to be able to recreate. We used the official WB character sheets to figure out the on-model poses that these 2D characters needed to hit in 3D. Often times when starting out, the first thing i'll do is take a pencil to a printout and draw my skeleton over the character and indicate any notes, special cases, or animator requests.
In the Looney Toons Coyote Falls, you have these very flexible rigs, what is your secret?
Patient animators. There's a ton of controls on those rigs... a ton. The key is to have them in the right spots, and to not show all of them at once - that would just overwhelm the animators. These rigs have the standard controls - stretchy, bendable limbs, volume preservation switches, extra joints where it matters. If something needed to smear across the screen, it most likely needed extra joints. We made creative use of deformers on top of the skinning too. Lattices, softMods, and wires, all usually layered in the rig with proper deformation orders. We put these rigs through many rounds of testing with the animators, which resulted in a lot of iterations of adding controls and features.
The animators themselves were also able to do some sculpting in-shot with some of our tools inhouse, as well as with some standard Maya deformers. Shots like the last one in Coyote Falls where coyote smacks against the camera glass - that was a creative use of a squashed lattice setup by the animator.
It must be said that the animators put a lot of love into those shorts. Our (riggers) success depends on their success :)
JW Player goes here
Chuck Jones had a big influence on the animation history. How did you feel about renewing the old Looney Toons?
First honored and excited, then a little scared. We did not want to have any part of something that did not pay homage to Chuck. We said at the start that we would go all out to make sure we nailed the classic chuck style, while still going for the semi-real look that WB was asking for. Even the models themselves went through many rounds of approvals until we were happy that they were close enough to the original designs, and that the rig could take the model the rest of the way based on the poses in animation. We did not want tiny toons models or anything remotely off-model from the classics, and we fought hard to push that through.
One effect that I really liked is when the Coyote moves really fast, and you can see three arms at once. How was that done?
Multiples! We basically had parts of the original rigs, with transparency controls, available to the animators to bring in multiple times per shot. Our animation TD wrote a tool to help animators deal with the multiples that we included from these rigs. Animator patience obviously comes into full effect here again as they were basically animating on 1's at this point, as well as a major props to the Lighters that had to deal with the crazy amount of multiples that the animators were adding to their shots. We gave the control to the animators to specify how much of the limb needed to be shown - whether it was a Road Runner head where only the head (no neck) was shown, or a fully faded coyote arm - animators could dial that in. That info was then passed down the pipe into lighting/rendering.
In your career, was there one challenge in rigging that particular was hard for you?
Good question. I can't pinpoint one single instance, but I can certainly list a bunch of items that stick out in my mind
1. Creating a really nice, animator friendly, deer leg rig. It took awhile to get the internal mechanics of this right, but it was definitely a challenge to figure something out that treaded the line between ease of usability vs automation for a 3-joint leg that you would find in a dog, cat, deer, etc.
2. We had an odd character to rig once that was a bit of a challenge - he was basically a snake-like body, but he had 4 arms, 4 feet, and a tail. the tricky part was figuring out a nice ik + fk solution that allowed the "tail" portion to stick to the ground like an inch-worm might crawl.
3. The road runner's leg/wheel. There's actually a lot of cool things going on in that rig even though it gets little screen time. There are some utility node networks that I setup that allow volume scaling of the joints based on position along the circle, so as the circle was spinning, the joints could scale as they reach the front of the circle. All animator controlled, of course.
4. Rigging and skinning Boog from Open Season (for Open Season 2 and 3) - we new how much control Sony had originally put into the silhouette controls for boog, and we knew how much that slowed down his rig. We obviously had to be able to match that amount of control, but because of our tighter deadline/quotas, we couldn't necessarily have that slow of a rig.
>There are plenty more challenges over the years, but that's just a few off the top of my head!
If somebody out there is thinking about becoming a rigger, what would be your best advice to them?
In order to be the best rigger, you don't have to be the best programmer. The 'tech' side of it can sometimes be lost on people - they will either absorb themselves into it too much, or be afraid of it. To be a great rigger, you need to find the happy medium. You should have a love for animation and should hopefully have animated yourself at some point - successful or not. You should also know how to model, but you don't necessarily have to be the best modeler. You should know your software package inside and out, always experimenting and challenging yourself to make a better rig. When you make a rig, you shouldn't ask yourself if it's a cool rig - you should ask yourself if it is easy for an animator to use while still giving them the control they want and need. Avoid over-thinking the mechanics of a rig. If a rig needs a manual on how to use it, you've gone too far. Collaborate with your team; animators are your client.
Can you tell us a bit about Rigging Dojo?
Rigging Dojo is an online school setup to train people in the art of rigging. We've set this school up a little differently than other schools, in that we aren't just giving a templated curriculum that gets generalized for all students. We try to cater towards the students skill level and adjust the instruction from there. There's a lot of focus on 'concepts' and a little less focus on tutorials. We want to make sure people are understanding the "why" and not just the "how".
Our intent from the beginning has always been to find and teach students that we would want to hire, and so far we have been successful at this. We've had students break into the industry, take their careers to the next level, and have even hired some students ourselves. We should have some new offerings coming up in 2012 for those that are looking for other options instead of just a 1-on-1 mentor course. More information can be found on our FAQ page at http://www.riggingDojo.com/faq/
Questions from the users
Matt asks: It seems that you've worked on a lot of projects that involved hair/fur. How does this affect your workflow in rigging, and what kinds of obstacles does it create?
It varies on the quality, the character, budget, but most importantly - the fur system that you have to work with. Typically we're given curves or nurbs objects that drive hair/feathers/fur, so we just need to rig those as we would rig anything else. We do have dynamics setup in those types of rigs, which animators can choose to use or not. The biggest problem when dealing with furred characters is usually the penetration of the fur itself. when an arm bends, you need to be aware of how long the fur is around the elbow and how it reacts to your skinned mesh. As long as you have a way to control the fur, you'll be able to prevent some nasty looking fur penetration.
Andrige asks: How long did it take you to create a character for the Looney Tunes shorts?
We had an initial rig out pretty quickly (couple weeks), but it went through many many iterations of fixes and changes. The key was actually getting the model as close to 'on model' as possible (according to the 2D character sheets), and that took time. We were making tweaks to the rigs all the way to the end, and we split up the rigging between body and face to 2 people, which helps the process go faster. I can't pinpoint an exact number for you, but I would approximate that we spent somewhere between 4 and 8 weeks on them. Possibly more :)
Andrige asks: Any literature you can recommend regarding character rigging / creation?
I wish i had an answer for this, but i'm not necessarily current on the latest published books, with regards to Maya and rigging. Most of the books I have are anatomy books that I've picked up at discount stores.
Andrige asks: Have you an opinion about the playable characters in games? If you were into that line of work, what would you do / do different?
I worked briefly in games years ago, so technology has certainly evolved since then. If you look at games like Uncharted 3 (just came out!), they are doing some really cool stuff with character deformations/rendering. I think technology is definitely bringing the film and game worlds closer, but rendered/film characters will always have the advantage of being able to layer on as many 'special' deformers as you want, where games are mostly limited to blendshapes and joints (that i'm aware of). You can really do the same stuff in the rigs though, you just need to approach it slightly differently. Take a look at what the animators achieved with Epic Mickey - that rig was pretty much open for any squash/stretch cartoony-ness that they needed. Perhaps not at the facial deformation level of Wile E Coyote, but they could push it pretty far.
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Copyright 2011 - Dennis Jensen