Just a few thoughts--haven't worked in the Feature Animation/VFX
"industry" as a rigger (yet), but I do rig/do Tech Art in games for a
living, and am a lead at an indie studio when I'm off the clock. I also
know/talk regularly with a lot of pros. So, please take my thoughts
with a grain of salt, but here they are.
1) Expression nodes are slow. Production rigs need speed above almost
all else, for the animators. In a full-on production environment,
you're going to tend to have Development teams to build C++ plugins to
speed things up, and IT staff to keep the pipeline running/ensure tools
are installed properly. This has been my experience even at smaller
startup studios, where Development/IT could even be one person (Heck,
it's pretty much my day job currently, and we're a team of 5). I've
never known student animators to like having to do all of the setup, but
generally in production the tools are already in place for one-click
loading for the animators. Even for tiny studios, things like
OpenPipeline make this kind of thing fairly easy. This is one area where
schools could improve--most have a standardized lab setup and an IT
department that doesn't allow outside tools to be installed on a
persistent basis, which is the source of most of the frustration of the
rigs you mentioned with shelves/pickers/etc. In a production
environment, these would usually be installed once, and then wouldn't
need to be touched (and would thus just be available) unless being updated.
2) The type of "all-inclusive" rig you mention is really nice for
students. However, it doesn't at all approximate the types of rigs I've
seen in production. Most rigs are highly specialized (and built on top
of a standardized scripted biped setup), and once a studio has something
that works well, there's no real reason to update it--doing so would
involve re-investing the development time for the tools, which is
extremely expensive. It's an investment vs return proposition. Also, in
production, file sizes are key, and the types of functionalities that
you're trying to implement would more likely be set up across a shared
interface that could be reused for every character using the base rig
(less scripts, less places for things to break).
3) Most riggers I've worked with (myself included) tend to thrive on
solving new problems. That's a nice way of saying we don't like
repetition :). As to what this means--unless I find one of my rigs is
slowing things down for development, I'll tend to use the scripts I
wrote 4 years ago to do the jobs, even if I know there's a shiny new
technique that will work. Unless that shiny new technique is going to
speed things up significantly or make my animators' jobs easier/quicker,
I'm not going to spend the time to implement it. This isn't because I'm
not interested in picking up the latest skills, it's more because I have
other things to do that make a more significant business impact. Again,
time is money, and this is a business.
As I said, I've only worked on small teams, so I can't speak with more
than hearsay for the larger houses (although I have friends at most of
the larger studios). If I got anything wrong I'd love to hear it--I
also teach rigging in my off time, so I'd be glad to update my knowledge
base as well.
Hope this helps,
Joe
On 10/8/2014 12:05 PM, notanymike wrote:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=7909562#post7909562
I'm not sure why I didn't get any replies on CGSociety about this.
Hopefully it'll get some thoughts & discussion over here...
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