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Former Student Spotlight: Ryan Yokley Zen and the Art of Rig Planning When creating a rig for their own personal short films, most animators tend to grant themselves a large amount of wiggle room when it comes to laying out controls and custom interfaces to interact with their rigs. If you’re the only person who is ever going to be fiddling around with the character, you can just modify the controls as you’re going along, right? I mean, what problems could that possibly generate 6 months from now when you’re animating scene 35 of 60 of your thesis masterwork? Ok, you probably sensed the regret there. Granted, there is a level of rigging that remains protean by necessity; it’s difficult to predict all of the functionality an animator or, help us, a team of them will need during the production cycle. But planning ahead, especially working within a studio production pipeline, is probably the most vital step when creating a comprehensive rig/control scheme for a character – one that will keep things moving smoothly under a tight deadline and won’t require the pipeline to come to a screeching halt every time a tiny change needs to be made to the character. In other words, taking the time to plan out your control scheme is a good habit to get into. While tricks like file referencing have given some leeway to the once extreme rigidity of initial character setup, it’s important to keep in mind how fast things often have to flow in a production pipeline to meet deadlines. In my limited experience, this is key in the game industry. Large changes to the rig often dictate adjusting massive amounts of ingame animation. So in whatever project you’ve got planned, get the animators together with the script and figure out what they are going to need. If it’s just you, sit down with your script and figure out what you are going to need before you dive into animation. Unfortunately, in the game industry, changes are often dictated outside of the framework of the animation team. Sometimes memory, programming, or engineering complexities require late changes to the skeleton. However, as suggested by a senior co-worker of mine, aim high when creating your rig and your skeleton, because it’s actually easier to downsize complexity later than it is to try to add functionality. Ryan Yokley received his Bachelor’s degree in Studio Art from Florida State University in 2002 and his MFA in Animation at the Savannah College of Art and Design in 2006. He has contributed his animation and rigging work to several award winning animated shorts including “The Machine” (Siggraph 2004 SPACE second place in Visual Effects category) and “The Audition” (Siggraph 2005 SPACE first place for Visual Effects category). Ryan did his internship at Vinton Studios (now Laika) in Portland, Oregon, in 2004. The project created by the intern team at Vinton was featured in the October 2004 issue of Animation Magazine. Since then Ryan has been working as a character animator at Rainbow Studios, a division of THQ, in Phoenix, Arizona. His work can be seen at: www.lineofaction.com.