Foreword

Rigging deformable characters is an essential part of creating CG character animation. It’s also a notoriously ugly and finicky process, one that requires labor-intensive fiddling with vertex weights and large numbers of influences to achieve even minimally acceptable character deformation, or grappling with baroque auto-rigging systems. And having painstakingly rigged one character by ad-hoc means, you have to do it all over again for the next.

The product you’re about to use is the result of years of effort Tagore Smith, Brian Kendall, and I have put into answering the question “Is there some high-level problem that all these characters have in common? And could you solve that problem, instead of solving the problem of deforming a character from scratch every time?” It turns out that there is, and you can.

Most characters are made up of a bunch of more-or-less cylindrical shapes. Arms and legs are tubular. So are fingers, and torsos, and necks. So are deeper structures, like muscles. If you had a really good way of deforming tube-like shapes that was visually pleasing and offered high-level control over bend and twist behavior, you’d solve an awful lot of the problems that rigging TDs face on a daily basis. That’s exactly what Contour Rig Tools provides. What may at first seem like an alternative skeletal deformation system with magically perfect default deformation is actually built on top of a powerful spline-based deformation system that can deform any tube-like shape while preserving fair and even curvature in the mesh, even when deforming thick meshes with acute curvature. Contour’s spline-based bones provide a elegant and predictable “primitive” that you can build almost any kind of rigs out of simply and quickly.

While Contour Rig Tools hasn’t been available to the general public until now, I’ve been using it for production in various forms since the early 2010s, and it has completely changed the way I approach character deformation. This is perhaps best illustrated by one of the earliest production uses of Rig Tools. We had to animate a cartoon hand as part of a web advertisement, but had almost no schedule left in which to rig it. Getting decent deformation out of a hand that will be seen in close-up is normally a lot of work, especially if the hand will be called on to perform cartoony distortions. It’s the kind of last-minute addition to a project that gives technical directors fits.

This proved a perfect test-case for a pre-alpha version of Contour Rig Tools. I drew in some joints, adjusted their deformation settings, painted some simple weights to separate the fingers from each other, and in less than an hour the hand rig was done, and I was animating with it. While the rig was crude in some ways—just some FK joint chains—it was in other ways very advanced. It was infinitely stretchy, with perfect twist and bend behavior, and it could hit exaggerated poses that would break all but the most advanced conventional hand rigs. A task that without Rig Tools would at best have relied on clumsy half-measures, and at worst been impossible, was suddenly easy to perform, with a very high quality result.

Since then I’ve created far more advanced rigs using Contour, rigs that included complex control rigging and mixed Contour deformation with other deformation techniques to take advantage of the best qualities of each. I’ve rigged stretchy cartoon characters, semi-realistic characters with pseudo-muscle deformation, and even characters whose “deformation” was actually a large number of moving individual transforms. Regardless of their other qualities, these rigs still benefited from being built on top of a powerfully simple core. When you know your character’s limbs will automatically be able to handle almost any pose from the moment they’re bound, it frees you to focus on the aspects of the rig unique to a character or production, instead of becoming bogged down in the details of getting the rig to a basic level of quality.

When I encounter a complex rigging challenge under a tight deadline, I am no longer concerned. Contour Rig Tools has taken away my fear of rigging. I hope it will do the same for you.

–Raf Anzovin