Rig ( Eng. Rig - rigging, fixture, harness) is a term in computer animation that describes a set of dependencies between control and controlled elements, created in such a way that there are fewer control elements than controlled ones. The purpose is to simplify the manipulation of a large number of objects.
Rig example
In a three-dimensional animation, various characters are often polygonal objects consisting of so-called polygons (polygons), each of which has vertices called vertexes ( English vertex ). In order, for example, to bend a character’s arm, you need to move the vertexes of the arm to a certain place, but make it so that between the initial and final position they move along a certain path, creating a feeling of rotation around the anatomical joint. For this, bones are used. In the Maya 3D graphics editor, they are called joints or joints. They usually imitate the turns of real bones, the position of each vertex depends on the position of certain bones, and several of them can act on one vertex at once. In one character, depending on the complexity of the required movements, there can be from 20 to 100 or more bones and influences (any other elements that perform a role similar to bones, but located in a different category and controlled differently).
Obviously, manually identifying all these bones in each frame of the animation is a rather time-consuming task, often giving an extremely unsatisfactory result, therefore, in the environment of three-dimensional animation, there is the concept of interpolating the position of animated objects between key positions. But even in this case, managing so many bones is quite difficult. To do this, auxiliary elements are created that, according to certain dependencies, control the bones so that the displacement, rotation or scaling of these auxiliary elements immediately affects the group of bones and influencers - thereby reducing the manual orientation of each bone individually.
See also
- Computer animation
- Inverse kinematics
- Skeletal animation