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CHRISTOPHER PANG
Rigging Technical Artist
Book
Intro
The main aim of this rig was to create a book that had both effective controls for deforming individual pages (without using any form of mesh deformation), while remaining lower in joint count so that the rig remained friendlier to a game engine.
Main features:
Sliders for easy page-flipping animation.
Assist controls to alter the path of the pages as they flip.
Individual controls on the pages to allow for precise animation even while the page is following the path.
A left and right page chunk that allow the animator to create the illusion of the page chunk heights changing as the book is being flipped through.
Bendable covers.
Pages
The book has a total of 5 pages; each consisting of 4 joints. I concluded that 5 would be a good number of pages after flipping through an actual book, and then taking the joint count limitations into account. The pages went through several iterations to see how low I could reduce the joint count of each page to, while maintaining a good level of deformation for animators to use. Initially, I tested 16 joints in a single page, arranged in a 4 by 4 grid evenly spanning the entire surface of the page. From testing feedback from an animator, I realized that 16 joints and corresponding controls made animating extremely tedious. Moving forward, I opted to focus the joints on the outer corners of the page, which were the main areas of deformation for a page.
The second iteration of pages consisted of only 3 joints – one on each outer corner of the page, and one in the center of the area where the page met the spine of the book. This proved to be significantly easier for animation but did create several unwanted deformations in the center of the page due to the fact that the spine joint was too far away from the vertices in the center of the page mesh. A fourth joints was placed in the center of the page to assist with this, and I decided to move forward with a total of 4 joints in the page after another short round of animation testing between myself and another animator.
Page paths
The page paths were created give the Animator the option of quickly flipping a lot of pages at once that followed the same path without having to keyframe the position of each page multiple times. The controls for the page paths are on a separate layer, as they can obstruct the Animator's view when they are close together.
Workflow
