Maya Monday: Corrective Joint Based Rigs

Image credit: Kiel Figgins

Kiel Figgins, the Lead Animator at Industrial Light & Magic Anim Rigs, shares his collection of Corrective Joint Based Rigs. I saw a couple of posts about this on Twitter this morning. In a word, it’s incredible and meticulous work.

Corrective Joint Based Rigs

A collection of setups I've been working on to allow animators to refine poses/silhouettes of characters. While removing major intersections during bends and extremes

Setup breakdown/high res: https://t.co/xLEUN1kk8j    

Questions? by all means ask! pic.twitter.com/S4D67cTdQ0

— Kiel Figgins (@KielFiggins) February 2, 2020

In addition, he shared that arm breakdown Maya file of his example of an isolated breakdown of the arm.

Wow, this took off! There's been a lot of questions on how, so here's the arm breakdown and an example file you can reverse engineer if your interested. Thanks again!https://t.co/TTFmtaUBat pic.twitter.com/znNSXMoEEK

— Kiel Figgins (@KielFiggins) February 2, 2020

Download Corrective Joint Based Rigs Arm (Maya 2014)

Below, watch his full breakdown. It’s really well done. Please make sure you read his write up about it from Vimeo, below the video.

Corrective Joint Based Rigs from Kiel Figgins on Vimeo.

*EDIT – Breakdown and example file in description
—
Due to a large amount of questions and interest, I did an isolated breakdown of just the arm as it’s the same setup used at the leg. The actual steps for creation were a bit more involved, so I decided to host the file trimmed to just that section so you can reverse engineer if you’re interested.

(Maya 2014)
3dfiggins.com/correctivejoints/3dFiggins_Corrective_joint_example.zip
—

I’ve been working up various iterations of these solutions for a while, but I’ve finally reached a point where all major areas are implemented.  The anatomy / skin weighting / etc are still off, but this is more about the system, finesse will come with further refinement and anatomical studies.  For the time being, this was to explore how, using as few additional joints as possible, I could remove major limb bend intersections, get a solid squat shape, head look up and internal pixel shift when the limbs are moving, all while being automatable and game ready.

There is a LOT more so read it on Vimeo.