So, I was asked a good question related to the "Autorig" last week and I stumbled while answering that, which obviously meant that I was not crystal clear of what+how EXACTLY I was creating. Considering the fact that it is never too late to BEGIN AGAIN, I spent some hours watching all the tutorial videos I planned to watch over the semester and note down what exactly each video is about and how far it will help me in creating the autorig. To my surprise, there were some new findings when I skimmed through those videos.
Procedural rigging with Python in Maya as the name suggests, takes us through the process of procedurally rigging a character. The end goal of this tutorial is to teach us how to rig a character procedurally. What does procedural mean in rigging? It simply means that, for example, when you are creating twist joints on legs and arms, you basically need to repeat the same process multiple times. Procedural rigging in this context means to automate that process such that you simply run a script and your twist joint will be created automatically. You can call this an autorig too, but this course doesn't shows us how to create UI which will be required to create an autorig. This teaches us a process which, I think, is followed in some companies where you get updates on the 3D models frequently and when you have to rig the same character multiple time over the production.
Autorig course by Mark Schipper on youtube, as the name suggests, shows us how to create a basic autorig starting with the basics of UI and going in a structured manner to create joints, controllers, curves and adding all of it in a UI. It looked quite promising for the study I'm doing. Creating UI in itself is a task which is different from autorig but is required to know the basics of it. If I had more time, I would learn Chris Zurbrigg's tutorials on PyQt and Pyside2.
Now, my progress last week and this week is that I learned the procedural rigging as per my schedule but it has been really difficult for me to follow along with the book - Practical Maya Programming with Python . I'm still in chapter 2 and it is really difficult to finish a chapter in a week when you have 5 other courses to work on.
I finished with the basic library that contains the class for creating joints, global controls, group structure to maintain a hierarchy, importing the character and the rig and adding them into the hierarchy so that on your single click on a fresh maya scene, your latest model, rig are imported and are properly placed under the hierarchy. For skinning process, i.e., exporting and importing the skin weights, I used the bSkinSaver script which is quite handly to use and is a life saver and skin weight saver too. I had to make some changes in it because it is old and I am using pyside2 library (remember! Chris Zurbrigg's tutorials!). I added the twist joint functionality which will create twist joint for the selected joint, which kind-of completed the deformation setup. There were a few things related to mush deformer and wrap deformer which I didn't used since I'm using my own model and rig, and I didn't had a high-resolution version of my model, otherwise, I would have added that too.
I have evaluated my progress and it doesn't feels like I am creating an autorig, even though, I am creating it technically. So, I'm going to discuss that with my advisor and will figure out my priority since I have 10 weeks left in this semester and I'm sure I cannot finish both the tutorials and the book. Till then, stay safe.
Peace!