Lead Technical Character Artist, Axel Grossman, discusses some of the processes and techniques that we used during the development of God of War.
Key take-away points:
- Decoupling (Attaching/Detaching) Control Rig from Skeletal Mesh
- Modular Rigging
- Adding on and connecting rig systems to existing rigs on the fly.
- “Semantic-Traversal” (Connections through network nodes and message attributes)
- “Sub-Rig” & Referencing
- Weapons / Attachments, Face Rigs and “Decap” Rigs (gory final kill rig)
- Maya + MotionBuilder (via HumanIK) for Motion Capture and Animation Retargeting Pipeline.
- Pose Corrections with Radial Basis Function (RBF) & Pose-Space-Deformation (PSD)
- RBF = Joints
- PSD = BlendShapes
- And more…
Example of character rig with a few PSD driven Corrective Poses.
Example of Decap “Sub-Rig” and controls for one variant of an in-game boss fight. (check out the gory glory kill here)