Do's, Don'ts and Challenges of a Rotating Rig

T-RIG3-001-004

Do's

• Start from the front view. This is the most even one. Distorting an element to look like it’s seen from a different angle will be easier than taking a distorted one and making it look like it is seen from the front.
• Use peg pivots, if new drawings are created or if some of them are modified, animators will not have to go back and position their pivots every time. Accordingly, you will have to create new drawings so that the pivot point of the drawing is located in the same position at all times.
• Be thorough with the rotation of your character. Trying to do a rotating rig on a character that has the nose shifting up and down depending on the view may look off when doing the full rotation. Some will be meant for more snappy animation.

Don'ts

• You don’t need to have too many frames of rotation. Seeing a 2D rotating rig sure gets the wow factor, but you don’t need to have too many frames for each view to achieve this. For instance, you don’t need 50 frames between the front and quarter front view. The character will never use those and it gives more work to the riggers to make sure that everything looks nice, as all will not be animated with interpolated keyframes.
• Don’t include in the rig things that you will see once in an episode. The more stuff you include in, the more complex the systems will be and the heavier it will get. Aim for the 90%, stuff you will see in 90% of the scenes.
• If a lot of the elements shift, change size, shape, or colour from one view to the other, rotating the character may not be the best way to go and a multi-pose view should be considered.
• Don’t use too many points in the envelope deformers, but don’t use too few either. Try to deconstruct how the movement will affect the limbs of your character and add the necessary points in the right places to have good solid posing.
• Don’t lasso around the pieces to pose them. Move up and down the hierarchy to select the peg of the entire face to offset it instead of setting down values on every single asset under it.

Challenges

• Lip-sync: The transition from front to side can be especially challenging since the mouth will be exposed differently, with the mouth interior seen on the front view and the side one. Depending on the complexity required, some will opt for having an entirely different set for the side view.
• Dosing the complexity of the rig: This will of course be a different level for everyone and goes hand-in-hand with meeting the needs of the production. Same as with other rigs, you can have a simple rotating rig and a very complex one.
• Elements appearing and disappearing: for instance, if a character wears a vest and turns from front to side, the side where the character turns will see the vest gradually disappear behind the character. The same challenge applies when the character turns from side to quarter back, as the elements of the face will disappear as my character turns.
• Creating systems that will work on all views of the rig.
• Pivot points on items that change size, especially on articulations, can be a struggle.