Rigging process for a character
Characters in Toca Days use an AdvancedSkeleton rig with a lot of custom behaviour on top. Some of the custom-built structure being things not achievable with AdvancedSkeleton, like the elbows and knees having a set of 3 extra joints to turn a sharp bend into a smooth curve (a stylistic choice to match the characters in Toca Life World). The face uses texture atlases which are animated by offsetting the UVs, and the same face rig template is imported to each character rather than redoing it from scratch.
The main reason for the custom structure however, is the rig export and animation export (page in progress!) The rig export clans up the scene and saves a copy for animation, and exports a much reduced .fbx file for use in game.
Rig export process
I don't want the animators directly referencing my working scene for animation for several reasons:
- in case a change in the rig breaks some animation the old version still exists
- my rigging scenes can be messy, with keyframes on controls and occasional unneeded objects like meshes used to help skinning (keeping the mess is desirable because it can speed up iteration when the rig needs updating)
- I keep the mesh and many parts of the face rig as references while working in case they need to be updated, and it's generally nice to avoid nested references. The animation version of the rig export can import these references
The version of the rig used in engine is of course pared down to just the essentials: skeleton, meshes, and objects tracking face animation. For performance reasons, we also remove skinning from any mesh with only 1 joint influence and parent them under their joint instead in the export. And remove unneeded leaf joints.