Author: JR

Date: 7/7/23

One of the many issues I had when it came to animating our character was control rigs, IK rigging and retargeting. Although I had some experience adding animations to characters, I had to relearn everything  to solidify my expertise as well as knowledge. I researched how to use control rig and IK rig, but it was more complicated than I initially thought.  I tried to implement it on our project, but I was coming up with more road blocks and issues than progress.

Control rig is what animators use to create a more dynamic animation in the engine using the model they're given. This gives them restraints in some sense as well as creative freedom with character to do the finer thing that a model wouldn't normally be able to do. The issue is that we weren't taught how to use control rig and learning it would bring more downsides than upsides given the time constraints. IK rig in the other hand allows creators to group skeletons together in chain links and create similar rigs to different models with different dimensions to use the same animation. The issue I came across with IK rig is that the model I use doesn't have a root bone unlike other models, as shown in the 2nd image. Which got me confused and a little disheartened. Which where I asked for advice as to how to overcome this issues.

I asked a lab instructor if he was familiar with control rig or IK rig, which he wasn't too familiar with but still helped me by sending me resources for me to read and learn. I have dropped learning control rig in the mean time as it is currently not needed for this for project nor will we need to have such fluid or dynamic animation. As for the issue I have with IK rig, I have decided to drop for this week  in favor of learning and prioritizing blend space instead. Although retargeting animations to different models would certainly be useful for our other classes. it is more beneficial for us to focus and polish one character rather than having multiple glitchy and buggy characters that doesn't have proper or appropriate animations. Moving forward I'm going to be focusing more on learning everything I can about blend space and have a character that have different animation states for the upper body and lower body.