My name is Mark. I’m a 3D character modeler, 3D rigger and animator for the underwater adventure game «O’raya». I’ve been working on this game for a year now.

I put much attention to building rigs and I’d like to share my experience as a rigger and animator in O’raya.

If I already have a concept art or if I already made a character 3D model, I as a rigger and animator can predict how the character will move and where it has to bend.To make it even more clear, I also ask my lead and art-lead about their plans on a character. That gives me additional info to plan my rig with.

Bringing a character to life starts with the placement of primary bones. When doing that I always put attention to a character’s anatomical joints. If the mesh doesn’t have anatomical joints or if it’s unclear or unimportant where they are, I predict the best possible bending pivot and place the bones according to that.

Many characters have hair and clothing. Most of the game skeletons don’t have separate bones for said elements but if they do, that usually makes the animations look much more alive.

Character also often have to have items in their hands and these items sometimes are required to move both together with the hand or independantly of it. This is also an important thing I as a rigger keep in mind when creating rigs.

So, a character’s shape and additional elements can tell me a lot about the character movements and what parts of them can move and how should they move.

The quality of a rig defines an animator’s quality of life during the working process.Animating the primary bones is mostly inconvenient. They are not flexible enough to let an animator work comfortably.

Creating a skeleton alone isn’t enough if I want a character to have high-quality animations. A rig has to have controls for all bones and the basic ones are forward kinematic controls or FK for short.

Most of characters, especially humanoid characters require their rig to have both forward kinematic (FK) and inverse kinematic (IK) controls for arms, legs and spine and an ability to switch between them and match them. That makes animating walking, holding, touching, e.t.c. much easier.

Bone chains for hair and clothes or for long characters, such as snakes and eels additionally need to have spline IK controls that can move middle parts of bone chains without affecting start and end bones of these chains.

Let’s start with the main character — girl named Agidelle.

Not only does she have all the controls nesessary for a humanoid, including facial controls, I also made her additional bones and controls for hair and clothes.That let me animate her hair and clothing movements. These movements may not be as noticeable as the main body movements but they make the movements more alive and interesting to look at.

The next peculiar example is the octopus.Animating tentacles is not the simplest task, so I made them FK controls and spline IK controls so I would have an ability to move several points of each tentacle individually for the maximum flexibility.

He also has a hat, a scharf and 3 puppets that he can put on his tentacles. All of these things have to have an opportunity to be animated individually so I added that opportunity.I also added the bones for the puppets’ eyes to animate them.