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A Whirlwind Introduction to Rigging and Animating Characters in EQII

Creating characters in EQII is a team effort that requires the work of modelers, texture artists, riggers and animators. Usually, the modeling and texturing is handled by one person and the animation and rigging by another. Below, I will describe the animation and rigging process, assuming the model has already been handed off and approved.

On some development teams, a separate artist rigs the character. Because the EQII artists can all multi-task, I usually rig the characters as well as animate.

This is the pandaman, a new NPC (non-player character) that will be featured prominently in the upcoming expansion.

There are actually 5 different versions of this character, but they all use the same skeleton. I will put all the meshes into the same Maya file and usually animate the character that uses the most bones, in this case the warrior at the bottom right. He has a feather on his head that animates, although I also had to use the guy in the top right to see how his skirt is animating.

Rigging

The first step in creating movement for the character is to create the character's rig or skeletal system...I'm really not too constrained by the number of bones I can use. There's a 255 maximum, but for the Panda's rig I came in around 77 bones.

Here's the final skeleton. He has a top root joint that is not animated. The programmer's use it for all of the magical stuff that programmer's do. You may also notice the two joints off of his hips. Those are the weapon bones and are used for holstering the various weapons. The pandaman is a tool user, so he has weapon joints in his hands to determine the placement of his weapons and tools.

Next, I bind/attach the mesh to the skeleton. We use a smooth bind and only get to use 2 vertices per joint. You could paint the weights if you wanted too, but I usually end up doing most of my vert work in the component editor. When I get him weighted on one side, I usually mirror the weights over to the other side and Voila! I end up with something like this…

panda_weighttest.avi

After I get the skeleton rigged and finalized, I will add a reverse foot IK rig to both feet and also a locator to constrain the knees. As soon as I'm done with that, I get to start animating!

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