Review : A complete guide to character rigging for games using Blender
– Hi, everyone. This is Pierrick from P2design. There is not that much resources about rigging out there, especially for Blender. There is my rigging course for sure that I published a few years ago and that is still mostly relevant, and a lot of my YouTube videos are rigging related. We can find great content from my peers like Todor from CG Dive mostly focusing on Rigify and automated rigging solutions. Level Pixel Level was also publishing great rigging content and a few other creators also tackled the subject but it’s not the easiest thing to find content about.
It’s even harder to find books about the subject. I mean, it was. Fortunately, it’s no longer the case and what a book just landed. “A Complete Guide to Character Rigging for Games Using Blender” by Armin Halac. And we talk about it right now. (graphics whooshing) Now, to quickly answer your question so that you can jump to another more interesting YouTube video, yes, you should have this book. Why? You should Stay for a few minutes. First of all, even though it’s titled as a book focused on character rigging for games, it’s absolutely relevant for any character
rigging needs as it covers all the fundamentals. Extra notes and informations are then added to cover the specificities of games’ needs. Fundamentals I believe is the
And if you wanna learn rigging, not specifically in Blender, this book should be your very first step. And I do believe that any character artist should add this book too to understand and learn the core fundamentals and core principle of creating characters for games. Being an employable character artist nowadays is not just about your drawing or sculpting skills, especially with the existing competition. And this additional knowledge about character optimization and topology may make you stand out. The book is generously illustrated and covers everything about rigging. It’s very well organized and easy to read. Basically, it’s
a rigging bible. The only downside is that it can be hard to recreate mechanism learned into a book compared to following a video tutorial. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. And the most important thing whenever you want to develop a specific skill is the core knowledge you will have about it. And this book, in my humble opinion, is so far the best resource ever released. I do believe you should know more about the author Armin to better know who you’re learning from. But first, a bit of self-promotion. If you wanna learn animation, rigging
and much more in Blender, discover my extensive courses on p2design-academy.com. Learn actual professional techniques or enjoy all my exclusive free character rigs, only on p2design-academy.com. Hi Armin, how are you doing? – Pretty good. I’m good. – Okay, cool. – How about you? (Pierrick chuckling) – As you know, I’m just tired and exhausted. (Pierrick chuckling) Can you introduce yourself, tell us where you’re from and what is your daily job? – My name is Armin or Armin if you want the the real proper pronunciation but I’m fine with Armin or you know, whatever people are comfortable with.
I’m in Berlin, Germany right now. Been living here since 2016. Originally from Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina. And currently, I work as a principal animator at a company called Wooga. – For how long have you been in the game industry? – Let me try to calculate that. I started like general 3D animation stuff in around 2010, I believe and then transitioned more direct into gaming around 2012. So 11 years, almost 12 years now. – Can you name some of the studios and games you worked on? – Yeah, so when I started, I did a lot of
freelancing. Couple of years I spent with a studio called Animation Rigs. I think the studio was, a bit before I joined, involved a lot with Animation Mentor and doing a lot of rigging services for different studios. I worked a bit on one of the “Wolfenstein” games with them. Then did some like smaller ad and video stuff. You know, like as freelancing goes, you kind of pick up whatever you can pick up. And then my kind of first bigger studio job was at the studio called Goodgame Studios in Hamburg, Germany. Then I moved to Berlin to
Wooga where I’ve been for seven years. Recently, we published or developed a game that was published by Netflix called “Ghost Detective.” Also, we’ve been running a game called “June’s Journey” for about five, six years now. That is like one of the biggest, most successful games in the mobile industry. I’m a bit in a centralized role where I jump between different projects and different roles depending on what is currently required basically, or you know, what kind of shoes I need to fill at that point. That can move between just pure animation for some months and then
just rigging and developing a pipeline, and writing some tools and stuff like that. That makes it interesting for me. I like doing this, like I don’t like a stale, you always do the same thing for years type of a job. So I enjoy this kind. I mean it’s a really good spot for me because I get restless if I tend to do the same thing. So I like this kind of jumping between different things. – And when did you start using Blender? – It was right before “Sintel” came out, so it was this big transition
from that old UI where everything was on this horizontal strip and you had to scroll like this all the time to find things. And I think that’s how I actually found out about Blender. Like there was this big release of… We did or they did like a major revamp of the UI and workflows and everything. – Just before 2.4, no? I think. – Yeah, I think it was around that time. – Yeah. – Yeah. – Okay, wow. (both chuckling) Right, so you developed a couple of Blender add-ons that are available on your website. Can you
explain a bit what there are here for basically? – Yeah, so I made two of them, which I really have to update for the new Blender version. I mean it’s hard to keep up with. – Yeah. – One is called ActionPoser. It is basically just a shortcut of setting up set driven keys or you know, drivers on anything, like driving corrective bones or facial expressions or stuff like that. I think I was working on a rig for something and then I found it so annoying that if you wanna work with the action constraint, instead of
pressing 200 buttons just to get somewhere, maybe I write a UI around this. And then I added more and more and more, and it kind of became a tool that I constantly use now. And the other one is an extension to Rigify that wraps all of the existing components of Rigify and just makes them compatible with game rigging. So it removes like weird scalings, disables all the B-bone stuff, so you don’t get deformations that will not look the same between like your game engine and Blender. And it also gives you like a clean deformation hierarchy
so you don’t have to write your custom exporters or stuff. You just on export toggle the use the form only. So it basically just does all of that work for you. So you can make a rig as you would with Rigify and not worry about is it gonna work for games? – We are here to talk about the book that is finally released. So what is this book about? (both chuckling) – When I was trying to come up with how do I call this book and everything and I wanted to be true to the content
and called it like “A Complete Guide to Character Rigging for Games Using Blender.” I intentionally started that with “A Complete Guide” because anybody else can make their own guide and that’s how I structured the book as well with these are ideas, these are things that work because someone else figured out how to do things that way. But as you know, you know, all of these tools or many of the tools that we use are not specifically made for any purpose. Like they’re not made for movies. Some are, but you know, some things work better for
games. That’s how I approached the book and tried to explain how we kind of hack our ways into making a rig, and making it game compatible and exportable, and pretty much everything someone would need to go from a bare bones mesh to something that they can animate and send to a game without much prior knowledge. – And why have you created this book? – There isn’t really, I mean I did as best of a research as I could and I failed to find such a up-to-date, complete, you know, collection of knowledge that someone would need
to go through this process and you know, not stumble but have, you know, clear guidance on why we do things the way we do things. There are some books on rigging, of course, out there but most of them are not for games. Most of them are outdated as well. You know, I remember when I was learning this stuff, it was really hard to get all of the details you need in one place. Like, you will find someone talking about bone placement somewhere but they might just write about, you know, arms and then you have to
figure out the rest and then you don’t know how to, you know, what mesh is good for rigging, like all these small things that you would dig for days, you know, just to find any information and you don’t know also if that information is tested, like you don’t know if that person is someone who just, you know, made a rig and assumes that that is how you make rigs and stuff. So I wanted to provide basically that for anyone who wants to, you know, get into rigging or animators who want to understand rigs better or
modelers who want to know how rigging works just so they can provide better models. You know, a lot of different disciplines could benefit from it but, of course, the main target audience is people who want to create rigs. – What was your main challenges creating this book? – At the start, the biggest challenge was trying to structure it in a way that makes sense, like in a book form where you start and then go through the entire thing and have a logical way of approaching to a rig because at least in my process, I found
that it’s hard to think of one thing at a time. If you want to place your bones into or onto a mesh, you want to see what that looks like also deformed. Like, you will bend your elbows and things and see if your placement is good, but for that, you also need the weights to be in place. So what do you do first? Like, you cannot do the weights because you don’t have bones and if you do the bones, you don’t know what it looks like if you don’t have the weights. I mean that’s like
one of the examples. And there were hundreds where I had to think about how to actually structure this and not make it boring or not make it too fast for someone to read. Another challenge was, I mean, just the sheer volume of work. – And why did you choose Blender? Because a good third to half of the book can be applied to any rigging software in the end. – The obvious thing is it’s my tool of choice. It’s what I’m most comfortable with. I mean, I’ve spent some years working professionally in Maya as well, like
at the beginning, a bit of three years max. But in the last, I don’t know, at least five, six years, I’ve been using Blender exclusively at work for my own private stuff. And I mean, I know it in and out and what works and what doesn’t work but it’s not just that. It’s also that it’s so approachable. You don’t need a super heavy computer that could handle Blender, pretty much any laptop or you know, anything you have at home. And you need two minutes just to go on blender.org to download like 100-megabyte file and that’s
it. Like you’re ready to go. – Okay. And where can we get this fantastic book I would say? – Well, thanks to the really great publisher, it is available pretty much worldwide. Like, whatever your local go-to bookstore is, they probably either have it or they can order it for you. There’s the usual like Amazons and book repositories and routledge.com. Yeah, it’s easy to find. – And will you be at the Blender conference? – Yes, yes. – Cool. – Of course. – So people can bring their book and you will sign it for them, right? –
I’d be happy to. (Pierrick chuckling) – Cool. So I’ll see you then and I’ll see you there. Okay? – I’ll see you there. – Okay, have a great day. Thanks for coming and thanks for the interview. Bye. – Yeah, thank you very much. Bye. (tranquil music) (tranquil music continues)
