Rigging considerations and options

Thinking about rigging, I looked around for suitable autorig scripts. While I could spend the time and brain power to rig from scratch, autorigging scripts provide a short cut to a very high quality rig. The better the rig, the more fluid the range of movement and the animation can be better as a result. As I have no desire to get into rigging as a career finding a decent autorig script will save me a lot of much needed time.

The one I used on my previous project (rigomatic) is suitable for biped characters, but unsuitable for quadrupeds like my cat. Also while it rigged the character I still had to paint the skin weights, a very time consuming process, even though I'm faster at it now than I used to be.

Browsing around I found this promosing script, The Setup Machine It not only creates a high quality rig, it also applies accurate skin weighting. You can also use it to create Quadruped characters, exactly what I need.

Also by the same company, there is The Face Machine an auto rig for rigging faces. I looked at the manual for information on how it works, all you do is reposition curves to fit the proportions of your face and it automatically creates point weighting based on the position of those curves. It looks like a very useful script and if it works, will save me even more time and allow for a greater range of facial movement. Most of the expression is in and around the eyes and the eyebrows so it would be good if I can have a good range of movement there. In my previous project I experimented a bit with blendshapes, mainly for the eyes, so that they were able to blink, but the blink alone needed 4 different heads to get the eyelid to curve around the eye rather than passing straight through it. Just thinking about the amount of blendshapes I'd need for a full face makes me queasy, an autorig script for faces is an ideal solution.

Obviously for the cat, the face rig would be unsuitable but the cat doesn't need as much expression as the man, he just needs to be able to open his mouth, perhaps move his ears (I can do these with joints), move and blink his eyes I've found a good tutorial on a simple eye set up for blinking eyes without the use of blendshapes.