Technical Journal Week 6 - Improved Foot Controls and Pivot

In this week's schedule, I was task to rig the robot and I had reach to the progress of rigging the foot.

Although you may already be familiar of rigging the foot through the use of SDKs - Toetap rigging. I decided to improve it and make it more convenient as through the previous semesters I've encountered restrictions with the Toetap rig. Here's an example of my very first toetap rig I did ever since I began animation,

As you can see, on the right hand column there are attributes controlling the movement of the foot. Don't get me wrong, this method works fine for animating but the catch is you do not get the pivots you need for certain movements. Moreover, after using this rig, I found it redundant to actually have SDKs (set driven key) for Heel Roll, Heel Twist and Heel Tap. You never actually have to use those because the base control on the foot could already do those movements, unless you actually move the pivot that is. So why didn't I use this rig again? Well simply put, this rig has gotten a little dull and I needed something fresh and better!

Inspired from the Norman rigg, I came up with this

Yes yes it's nothing special in particular, but what I love about this kind of rig is that you get to be more versatile with the movements. For example, there are 4 pivotal points controlling the foot. For instance, if you want to do a tiptoe all you have to do is select the specific yellow control and rotate it. Moreover, there are no limits as so to using SDKs. In other words in a proper toetap rig you set it to rotate at 45 degrees and that kind of restricts the movement. But then you will ask, I could just connect the attributes via connection editor, that would give the same results! I would agree on that too, however having SDKs will not give you at much pivotal points as a control base rig. Even though it could be accomplished, it would take much more time to rig it and you might just complicate the whole rigging system. As a whole, through my experience I would actually rig from the control than the SDKs simply because it looks more practically to my eyes, even though both an SDK and ctrl rig was available to me.


Here are some screenshots of what it can do!

 Foot Bend

 ToeTap

TipToe

SidePivotRight

 SidePivotLeft

 BackPivot

Here's an overview of the outliner

There are more movements it can do as well, like swivel of the back and from pivot. This rig is good for animation such as falling or acrobatic dance movements.

All in all, when it comes to animating it all boils down to preferences. Hence rigger these days try to give animators as much options as they can to animate. However, you can only put so many different functionality into a rig. As a result, riggers try to figure out the best and convenient ways for animators to animate.