TUTORIALS | Rigging a quadruped for animation

MAYA

Do the foxtrot Part one

At the heart of every animated character’s performance, you’ll find a well executed rig. In the first of two
tutorials, discover all you need to know to achieve effective character set-up and animation BY FIRAT ENDEROGLU
haracter set-up is truly the unsung hero of the exceedingly complex, we will walk through a simplified rig through

C animation world. At the root of every great

animated performance lies the foundation of
a successful, well-planned rig. One of the most
challenging models to rig is a quadruped. Unlike bipeds, which
have one centre of mass based at the pelvis, quadrupeds have
FACTFILE two: one at the withers (the highest point on the back, between
FOR the shoulder blades) and one at the hindquarters. For ease of
Maya 7+ animation, independent control over these two points is crucial.
DIFFICULTY The model we’re using to demonstrate this rig is based on a
Intermediate realistically proportioned red fox. It is a simple polygon mesh created
TIME TAKEN in Maya, made exclusively for 3D World. The model, UVs and texture
2 hours maps were designed by Gwendelyn Robson.
ON THE CD This article is aimed towards experienced Maya users and
• Full-size screenshots assumes the reader has a basic understanding of character set-up,
• Maya scene files
• Finished rig
including connection types, simple IK and FK set-ups and constraints.
The purpose of this tutorial is to offer the user an idea how
ALSO REQUIRED
N/A character set-up TDs approach rigging quadrupeds in a professional
production environment. As production-level quadruped rigs can be
to completion, inspired by professional concepts.
When designing any rig, you should be conscious of the full range
of the character’s actions and performance. Also, for successful joint
placement, it is crucial to be familiar with the anatomy of the creature
you’re rigging. For the fox, our goal is to produce a rig capable of basic
animation cycles and full-body performances.
Once you have completed the tutorial, we recommend that you
start from scratch by creating your own joint hierarchy rather than
using the one provided. You will hopefully discover how well-planned
joint placement will impact the realism of your character’s range of
motion and performance. In next issue’s follow-up to this tutorial,
we shall build upon the foundation of this simplified rig and progress
to areas of higher detail and complexity, including the face.
Firat Enderoglu is a pipeline TD at Sony Pictures Imageworks,
on projects including Spider-Man 3. His rigs have recently been
showcased in Inspired 3D Advanced Rigging and Deformations.
www.animatr.com

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 Rigging a quadruped for animation | TUTORIALS

STAGE ONE | Rigging the legs

Load Stage01.mb from the CD. The model is
01 templated and the basic joints are placed and named,
with their local rotation axes (LRA) set up. Note
that they don’t all connect: we will connect them as we go
through. This file also includes controllers that aren’t attached
to anything: feel free to use these or create your own.
Place a joint below the waist joint and name it
02 ‘rr_cn_legs’. Set the LRAs to the world by using the
Orient Joint tool and setting Orientation to None.
Parent the legs to this joint and parent it to the waist joint.
The reason we’re not connecting this to the spine is because
we want to separate all the waist motion. Connect ctl_rr_legs
rotations to this new joint.
Now do the same for the chest. Create another joint
03 right below the spine_6 joint, name it ‘fr_cn_legs’
and set its LRA to world. Parent the legs to this
joint, but point-constrain (Constrain > Point) this joint to
spine_6. Check Maintain Offsets so the joint won’t move.
Orient-constrain (Constrain > Orient) this joint to ctl_fr_legs.

EXPERT TIP i
Local rotation axes (LRAs)
When you want to connect a joint
directly to a controller, you need to
ensure they both have the same LRA,
otherwise the driven joint will be
offset. Create a null node and name it
by adding ‘_par’ to the driver’s name.
Snap it to the driver node, orient-
constrain it to the driven joint then
delete the constraint. Parent the driver
object under this null node and Freeze
Transformations. This will make it
Note that the base neck joint is also separated from Create a null node, name it ‘neck_base’ and snap
inherit the LRA from its parent node. If
04 the spine. We won’t parent the neck to the spine
it’s parented to the world, it will zero 05 it to the spine_6 joint. Give this node the same
because we want to control the rotation of the head orientation axis as the spine_6 joint (see the Expert
them out. This way you can directly
from the chest and neck controller’s rotations. If we parent it, Tip to the left), and you should end up with neck_base node
connect a controller to a joint without
the head will rotate even when we move the chest controller parented under the neck_base_par node.
offsetting the joint’s orientation.
up and down.

Point constrain neck_base to spine_6. This will
06 stop unwanted rotations on the neck – but we still
need to control it, so orient constrain it to ctl_chest.
Parent the neck joint under neck_base.
Now we’ll set up one leg, but the instructions are
07 applicable to the other legs. Make sure to add the
side tokens while naming nodes. Create an IK handle
from leg_1 to the leg_3 joint, with the Sticky option selected,
and name it ‘up_ikh’. Freeze transformations.
Make another Sticky IK handle from the leg_3 joint
08 to the leg_4 joint. Call it ‘dn_ikh’. We’re going to use
a lot of empty nodes and parenting tricks to get all
the control we want, and then we will connect these empty
nodes to the controllers, giving us a cleaner set-up.
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 TUTORIALS | Rigging a quadruped for animation
STAGE ONE (Continued) | Rigging the legs
Point-constrain dn_ikh and orient-constraint the
09 leg_4 joint to the foot controller. Select Maintain
Offset in the Orient Constraint Options box. Parent
the foot controller under the hock controller, then parent
both of the IK handles and the hock controller under the leg
controller. Pole Vector-constrain the PV controller to both of
the IK handles and parent its parent under the leg controller.
STAGE TWO | The spine
We can’t parent the waist joint to the spine because
12 of our spine rig’s complications. When we move the
beginning of the IK spline, where the root joint is, it
will drag the rest of the joint chain without properly moving the
controllers. To combat this, we’ll do a trick similar to the neck-
to-chest connection, but we will just connect translations.
Create a spline IK from spine_1 to spine_6 with
14 spine_curve; name it ‘spine_ikh’. Create clusters for
CVs on each end and one cluster for two CVs in the
middle. Make sure the Relative option is selected. Name them
as ‘spine_a_cls’, ‘spine_b_cls’ and ‘spine_c_cls’, with ‘a’ being
the waist one. Parent them under spine_curve and it will
automatically group the clusters. Don’t forget to name them.
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TDW89.t_fox 050
After finishing both of the rear legs, set up the front
10 legs the same way. The only difference is that the
hock joint and its controller are absent. Create the
IK handle from leg_2 to leg_4, and connect the shoulder
controller’s rotations to the leg_1 joint. Do the same for both
of the front legs.
Create a null and name it ‘waist_base’. Point-
13 constrain it to the spine_1 node, ensuring it doesn’t
maintain the offsets. We need this null to be in the
same position as the spine_1 joint. Parent the waist joint
under this node. Now the set-up will not drag the fox’s tail,
and the controllers will remain with the joints.
Point-constrain ctl_waist, ctl_back and ctl_chest to
15 these clusters, with Maintain offset selected. Also
orient constrain ctl_waist to waist and ctl_chest
to the spine_6 joints. At this point, you should clearly see
how the rig is going to work if you play with those three
controllers. Hide the spline IK handle.
Next, we’re going to use a spline IK set-up for the
11 spine of the fox, but it will be slightly different from
setting up a common biped spline IK set-up. For
example, we will try not to lock each end: this way we will
have a rootless back set-up.
EXPERT TIP i
Spline IK
The most important part of this set-up
is the curve that will be used in the
spline IK. We don’t want to use a lot of
controllers: one for the chest, one for
the waist area and one in the middle
should suffice. Ideally, a curve with
three Control Vertices (CVs) would be
great, but we need four CVs to make a
cubic CV curve. This is an area you can
experiment with. Remember you can
always use a pre-made curve while
creating the spline IK: just turn off the
Auto Create and Auto Simplify options
and select the curve after selecting
the base and end joints. You can also
make changes to the curve afterwards.
Because of the way quadrupeds move, you will
16 want to have more than one pivot node for the body
controller. We will use an old trick that involves
using a Multiply Divide node to negate the transformations
on a node, letting it only rotate the hierarchy.
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 TUTORIALS | Rigging a quadruped for animation
STAGE TWO (Continued) | The Spine
This trick will give you a pivot node that you can
17 move. However, as it won’t move the rig, you can
position it wherever you want and rotate the rig
from that position. You can apply this to any node or rig on
which you need a second pivot.
STAGE THREE | The tail end
For the tail, ears and jaw, we will use basic FK
20 controllers. Their LRAs are already adjusted to
match the joints, so all you have to do is to connect
rotations in the Connection Editor as shown above.
Before finishing, we need to organise the scene
21 a little bit. Parent all the leg controllers under
Placement, then parent Placement under Fox. Group
spine_1, neck_base_par, waist_base, spine_curve, spine_ikh
and fr_cn_legs, name the group ‘Rig’ and parent it under Fox,
as shown above.
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TDW89.t_fox Sec1:52
Next, group ctl_body and name it ‘ctl_body_neg’.
18 Group the neg node and name it ‘ctl_body_piv’.
Select the piv and neg nodes and open Hypergraph.
Switch to Dependency Graph by pressing the Input and
Output Connections icon. Select Rendering > Create Render
Node and create a Multiply Divide node under Utilities. Name
it ‘ctl_body_piv_md’.
Before binding, don’t forget that the joints are not
22 all parented under a single node, so you need to
make sure you pick all proper joints. Also, don’t bind
the eyes, because they are already constrained to the head,
and it will cause double transformations. This particular rig
has not been designed to make ultra-realistic deformations:
the purpose of this tutorial was to give an idea of how to
Type ‘-1’ for all the Input2 fields in the attribute
19 editor. Connect ctl_body_piv’s translate into Input1,
and connect the output from the md node to ctl_
body_neg’s translate. Lock all the channels of the neg node,
position ctl_body_piv to wherever you want the pivot to be
and then rotate it. You can use this trick on any node or rig.
approach rigging a quadruped for the first time, how to set
up a spine, what parts of the movement we want to isolate,
and so on. Think of this rig as a base muscle car: every
section of it is designed to be improved upon. If you have
questions related to this rig or character set-up in general,
I would be more than happy to help. You can contact me
personally at 3dwtut@animatr.com. ●
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