The Rigging Buddies Podcast #34 Josh Sobel

[Music] well the the short answer is that like most people i started focusing on animation like character animation and stuff and eventually as you're just comparing yourself to your classmates and realizing where you excel and where you don't you just kind of drift over into the more technical side of it but the long story of how i got into it is that pretty early on even in high school i found myself experimenting with the maya 7 personal learning edition with the giant giant watermark across the screen when you render and everything and i think the reason i got into that was because i guess the marketing departments at a lot of the studios did a really good job with all their behind the scenes videos like uh showing how they make gollum or showing that when you go to pixar animators just ride around on scooters all day um so it was like a combination of seeing seeing those pieces and thinking oh that looks like a cool a cool atmosphere to work in and also at the time i was into like doing a lot of art like just you know general high school art classes with painting and drawing and also doing theater and it's like and technology like building computers and stuff and animations or you know related industries it's kind of the center point of all those uh interests so it kind of just happened at some point i was like i guess i'm going into animation i don't remember the the specifics and then i went to the savannah college of art and design uh for animation and i assume i thought i was going to be the character animator because that's it's you know you're going into animation that's what it's called and then i focused on character animation for the first couple years and started out really strong but at some point i realized i wasn't really getting any better and my friends were and it didn't cause me to like panic or anything in it and it wasn't even until my senior year where i started to pivot and the way it happened was i believe the first part was uh are you familiar with the malcolm rig from adam school uh yes so so the malcolm rigg came out and at the time there were only a few rigs out and malcolm was by far the most flexible out of all them we were like this is the coolest thing ever and then uh i don't remember why but i think it might have been just for an assignment i was working on with malcolm i decided to make a female mod for him and i barely knew how to rig so i just threw this like sloppy blonde ponytail geometry on the back and did a full body blend shape with just some more some more curves basically to the body and my classmates were like oh can i use that can i use that and it said on the the malcolm site you know if you make any mods to them feel free to send send them over to here maybe we'll put them up on the uh website so i ended up doing that and and dave gallagher at adam school did end up putting it up there and i got a surprising amount of notoriety for that i mean i i didn't i don't think i had like i may have even had a link to it on my website i don't remember but at least the people i knew were like this is super cool and then at some point they were like you should just put this this rig from your senior film bonnie online too i don't remember who said that or how i decided to do that but basically i had this rig that i made and i can i can share the screen and actually have her open here somewhere that's uh it's funny because you know the uh when i started rigging the the first proper training i mean it's it's a common it's that i i had to learn reagan was in soft image 3d and was with the vhs from david gallagher back in 2000 i think was there i mean i don't think i've seen that but with my school definitely had one of those a library full of dvds yeah i think they probably was one of the first to probably um [Music] um yeah with vhs yeah probably was the first like real like tutorial on um like rigging i ever know yeah he's a nice guy i met him at uh ctn a couple times i i you to contact him to bring it to the podcast will be really nice can you see my screen right now yes yes uh so this is bonnie i i was working on my senior film everyone does a senior film at scad and i used i had taken like one rigging class but or one or two i'm not sure but i i used i don't even know who made this but a b auto rig was one of the go-to auto rig systems uh at the time and i used that to make uh her body i'm assuming whoever we're talking about his name is initialed a b apology apologies to them we should look that up but um so i use that to write her body and then for her face uh you can tell how terrible i was at rigging because i didn't even color the control but um so her face is basically 100 blend shapes um just like out and up down i don't even think there are any correctives here i mean this is your first rig yes and it's awesome i mean i'm not going to show you ever my first week probably let's look in the outliner and just see what what awful stuff is in here wow it all oh you know what i wonder if there's some broken name space or something going on or did i did i really name it an all caps bonnie adam face mouth before everything that would be kind of ridiculous it's possible it was a very long time ago but yeah so i ended up putting this rig online and because at the time it was kind of it kind of jumped started my whole career and i remember looking at the download count sometime in the first year and it was at like 30 000 or something wow that's amazing which year was that by the way just to put some antennas to the people like this was probably 2013 2013 yeah yeah and it was really really lucky it was right place right time kind of thing because i think i already said at the time there were only a couple rings out there there was like norman there was there was malcolm there was moom um and then malcolm had uh just come out or wait i said malcolm i meant morpheus but but then malcolm came out too so there were you know less than 10 kind of go-to rigs out there maybe even less than five and this was the first one that was like you know a full female character uh with face and and everything so it ended up giving me a lot of notoriety right off the bat and i was also able to use this in my demo reel to like get my first job which was a brief two-month thing at real effects and it kind of just kicked everything off from there and i met with uh disney recruiters while i was at scad because they you know they have the students talk to people and stuff and that led to me getting the disney apprenticeship which was a one-year thing after the real effects gig and it was after the disney uh gig for one year when i where i worked on a feast which was an animated short and uh big hero 6 the film where i got let go after the year apprentice program so i made it through the whole thing but at the end you know they decide if they who they have room for and all that kind of stuff didn't make the cut of course i was upset about that at the time but i ended up using the time off after that before i found another job to make my first paid rig which was i have her open here somewhere uh kayla kayla one on the left here i'm currently working on kayla too uh she'll be out in the next couple of months hopefully um but the the video series which uh before we recorded you were telling me you even uh purchased at some point yes the facial rig tutorial series thank you it's very old i'm embarrassed i need to get out of 2.00 i mean there's i i always i if there is tutorials from anybody like even i unless for me i always learn something new i always learn something that has value and even if i mean the time passed there is the return butter it's always the same and it's uh right thank you i think it's great so so the facial rig tutorial was all based on kayla so i made kayla and that tutorial series within a few months of leaving disney and i that's when i excuse me that's when i founded josh snowballriggs.com which was my company before i transitioned into uh frigging awesome studios which we'll get to later and i was kind of seeing you know what the landscape is if i could like make a living off this and stuff so i ended up you know taking some of the skills i learned at disney and and you know on the side and everything and and putting it into what is still very much a blend shape uh driven uh character but just way way far above what i was able to do with bonnie but it's not it's not the most practical face rig from a rigger perspective as far as like there's a lot of uh fine tuning of sculpting going into this because there's no joints involved here like i just made this shape from scratch and i think i did use some joints to like roughly get it into place but um i'm still happy with like still happy with how this looks these days is just too much of a hassle to like replicate so i don't really use these methods anymore um but uh kayla is still my best selling rig on my store like even more than than ones that are far more uh up to date and that was another right place right time thing because there weren't any uh children ranks out at the time uh so that was a nice step forwards i made a decent amount of income from releasing kayla and that tutorial series but um what was his name uh but it wasn't it wasn't enough to like live on like you know it was nice side income so i ended up doing a blue sky temp gig after that and kind of jumped around ended up at psyop made some rigs in between uh here and there and they all kind of used the same rough uh rigging setup as kayla which was completely from scratch like i there's no auto rig involved here so there were you know there's a lot of difference between my rigs over the years which is kind of my most my biggest frustration with my uh library right now is that there's not a lot of uniformity between the rigs which makes it very hard to go back and like update them because they're all different you can't just like update some code and rerun the build um so that's what i'm kind of working on going forwards is uh having more of a unified rigging pipeline and you know taking a lot of what i've learned recently about like parallel evaluation and performance because like kayla was a real-time rig but uh bonnie too which i released a few years later do i have her open i don't think i do but but bonnie too is the rig that's like the most up-to-date tech that uh and i guess i'll just open her up actually but i think one of the points that uh people can get from here is like sharing it's really good for your career i mean you started like sharing stuff from the beginning like with a bunny and and you land like in in like this um uh i think it's the first the uh real effects and then you land the uh internship and disney that that's i mean there's only a few spots and people probably you get it because the people know you because the rig you share that was public available and right and that's um that's a huge value there i i see some people that is very um well they do they demo real or they are very protective with his uh secret sauce that i don't think there is such a thing yeah i know what you mean and the yeah even history trade secrets and stuff yeah yeah yeah i remember like yeah some some uh can i say names but there is a few weeks that it was like share just if you are nice like something and then i i just out of curiosity i just opened the rig and it was all like um [Music] i just said i don't know how they even probably it's a lot of work just to make huge uh cryptic everything with all the names and make some much so basically you cannot reverse engineer anything there you cannot just open the rig and learn something from there it was like a huge yeah it's a mess to protect his know-how and i was ah so my rigs are all my products are 100 on the honor system and i've i've just never had a problem with it um like obviously anybody can download them and just give them to their friends illegally but i mean i'm sure that happens but it's just not enough to matter yeah well i meant it's not that part that should be not i mean if it's like some like a commercial product or something you should respect the license i'm just talking about curious like if you do like oh the eyebrow and i just opened the rig and i'm curious how you solve this or the other way or how you do different even not too complicated pure curiosity and it was like a cluster mess of things that okay good but yeah so this is a new one yeah so this is a bonnie too that's the last rig i published before i went to dreamworks so probably about three years ago now and a very different type of facial setup when compared to kayla a lot easier to set up on a rigger end and a lot more flexible as far as like way more controls and stuff like the mouth all kind of works as one system and stuff but there are some serious performance issues with bonnie too because with some of the skills i picked up uh over the years it's like well animators want like you know one control per span for the eyes and the mouth and and also to like have all these little controls here follow along exactly where you predict them to follow along and so i ended up using a lot of follicles for this so basically there's a follicle pinning each of these controls to the face and um uh charles wardlaw who you had on the uh podcast a few weeks ago he's currently making a rigging dojo optimizing rigs for parallel evaluation in maya course and i've been learning a lot from him he's using bonnie too as the the example uh in that series so one uh one i want to grab when it's released it's not yet correct no not yet he's still working on it but it's going to be really really essential because i have i had i have had no clue what goes into knowing how to make a rig speedy i was basically just like i guess rigs are slow like when i went to my first couple studios i was blown away that all of these rigs were running at like three frames a second basically and it was a couple over the next couple years that people started to figure out how to optimize for parallel and a lot of the big studios would develop their own systems for like having invisible mayas in the background caching the frames and all that kind of stuff but now we're kind of at a point especially with my 2020 where everything's optimized enough that if you if you know what to avoid and how to set up your rigs you can get a real-time rig through parallel evaluation pretty easily but if you google some of the stuff online there's like nothing and so this tutorial that charles is making i think is going to be really useful yeah but the the really quick example of just how terrible uh this rig is for performance is that and i didn't even know about this button until charles told me about it but under general editors there's the evaluation toolkit yes and if you look at the cycles here i think i have to actually get some keys to this one and and the uh profiler it's it's your best friend yes very essential but there's not much information on how to use them so i just keep that the opposite but that's okay so if you look here i don't know if this number is the amount of cycles or milliseconds or what but 700 is insanely high and it's all coming of this year goals yes yeah so she isn't that high res but basically on my new setup i'm trying to keep everything under like 20. so 700 is pretty ridiculous and it's all because of these follicles so there's all these it's not so much just like don't use follicles don't use wraps because they're slow it's like learning how maya under the hood calculates this stuff so that you can avoid this stuff and i'm excited for him to finish this series it's been it's been very very useful learning that stuff yeah there is a i i always like feel like there is so much to learn and when you think you you you okay my rig is nice and you realize oh but it's not like that fast or it can be better or when you finish you have learned enough stuff that um you feel okay i want to restart again so that's something that always happened oh i think your camera went completely green you have a filter what maybe can you share again and maybe or stop the camera and just gonna be okay now it's back to normal yeah no you're normal human again sorry um so yeah uh i lost a little bit that train of thought but yeah like this uh kind of like process where you do something you you satisfy then realize oh you learn new stuff and always this keep going and going yeah and when your stuff's all online for people to buy and buy and use there's no taking it back you can't hide yeah yeah you'll just forever be ashamed of your old stuff and i guess that's good because it'll drive you to make new stuff it's an internet fade yeah you can put it there for your apple maybe a few minutes of satisfaction and then oh no why i did that yeah but but because of that the plan this year is to is to release uh uh kayla two who's in the works i haven't done any face stuff on here so it's not very fun to look at but i've basically been building this uh this rigging system for myself from scratch to to be able to just quickly churn out my rigs going forwards and it is a it is a data centric pipeline i know you're you're kind of the data centric uh guy yeah you're in stuff proponent of the system unless someone comes and split me up one better then i will reach it the ability to to rebuild in in any version of maya and to just change some code and then rebuild the whole rig in a fresh scene without worrying about what history is getting left over from all the sloppy rigging and yes and stuff is very useful yeah there is a lot of advantages i think we had this conversation back in uh with rafael frappan in the uh cult of rig when we talk with um rafa zovin also about the rigging as a as a software and one of the concepts that i i like to think it's it's like the rig it's you compile your rig it's not like the asset that you open and change it's more like yeah every time you build you you create like a new compilation that's rigging is too too too detailed these days to just you know start start making something in a in a linear fashion you got to be able to kind of go back and adjust stuff and and for those that i'm sure don't know what what on earth we're talking about right now we just mean a database pipeline means you hit basically i have an export data button then it exports all the deformer weights and the control shapes so anytime you just open up a a scene that just says geometry and joints you can just rebuild the whole thing and it'll and it'll bring all of your data back in and it's independent of maya versions as long as the tool works and yeah and that's uh that's that's how it's been at pretty much every studio i've yeah i've been at both for cloth rigs and uh and for character rigs yeah it's not like something i mean obviously i i was pushing that uh data centric thing that uh but it's not something i i made out of i mean there was people before me and the studios many years that was doing that i think it was not like out there like on the while let's say i if you search a few years ago there is no like any conversation going on that in any public space in internet or you know you know like people working on these studios or that they have this kind of rebuilding serialization and rebuilding systems but there was no like any word of sight there it was like oh this is just for big pipelines and things like that i don't agree that i think it's everybody with a healthy goal in mind like human health should use this kind of uh and it's very important for any i think it's very important for any rigger who plans to do any any freelance work in their life as far as like using their own their own version of maya instead of remoting into somebody somebody's studio or going to a studio i think it's very important to either induct or in in inducts like if that's the word some you know you need you need rigging tools to work with you can't you can't like when i graduated school i thought it would be fine to not know how to script or to just you know build rigs from scratch every time like if there's too much room for error you're gonna have to charge for way more hours than someone else who already has that stuff or take a huge pay cut or work for free and it's not only that i think the uh obviously the complexity i mean the reagan if you think like rick's like 10 15 years ago that what you need to do now as something like a production rig i'm not talking about like big feature films like just a regular maybe middle budget like tv series or uh commercials like uh at things like that that it's more like fast piece normally was not normally the absolute best reading you can do because there was a big time constraints with these kind of projects maybe in weeks or even one week sometimes projects so that has been changed a lot i mean now if you take any commercial and you've been also working on commercial in inside the quality that you have on these rigs on the the the animation like in top of my mind like be still like a student cave scio um park in the states uh nathan loft i mean there's a lot of um milford in in europe or um i mean in london there is a huge huge amount of also like studios that they put a lot of uh quality on these uh little pieces that this very short uh period of production and i think it's the only way that you can get that nowadays it's like yeah to having systems in place i don't know it's like a few it's like if you build a rig from scratch five times like you could have built a full decent auto rig system for yourself in that time and then it's just one click from there on yeah and and there you could always just you know buy a license to am gear or i mean i think mg is free right no yeah you cannot buy it it's free yeah yeah but you could like i was thinking like you could buy advanced skeleton or just use you know the free ones like like m gear one of the other ones that's already you know done i haven't personally looked into that stuff uh too much partially because i feel like if i'm selling rigs online i just feel better if i know that you know i'm selling yes i mean every i i think every system has its own um like right uh like let's say users or the the right project to to use or obviously uh everybody that does uh rigging systems try to to make history system as much as uh like uh produce as possible i guess like you can use it for many many things but yeah depending of what you needs are obviously it's better in your case i mean if you're doing also these tutorials and training i think it's much better if you do your own system because obviously identity yeah exactly and um depends i mean what's your goal i mean sometimes it's one just an animator i want just to put a rig here so maybe anything in my system one very limiting goal of mine over the years has been that um my biggest market is students and students never have access to install plug-ins and stuff like that so i've always heard good things about mgear but my like the totality of my experience with rigging outside of a completed studio pipeline is with the goal of never having any plug-ins whatsoever yeah that's a conversation to cut out a lot of pose drivers and m-gear and all these other things yeah yeah this is something that that's um i i'm i'm oh well i was talking that yeah with a friend yeah they like there is always this oh no you cannot use custom you should use custom my opinion is that uh it's the most important when you go to in production it's it's quality and it's equality in terms of the appealing deformation control things like that but also in like what we're saying like speed and functionality you know so you need to and there is a balance between having custom servers and custom stuff that you can you know made like a monolithic kind of node that does a lot of functionality in really really fast way like in c plus plus compile things obviously that have a trade-off you need the plug-in but you know it depends for me i personally prefer not to use all my vanilla notes because i know there's a trade-off in other areas uh but it's true that sometimes some clients they ask it to to use only vanilla notes and there is not official components on em gear that use vanilla notes there is some in a secure uh it uh it's called git gish the one that you put snippets there that there are full vanilla maya notes but i'm not supporting that but maybe in the future but as you say like students that's a big issue because probably the learning so what can put planes here i mean i i should say this but i still get a lot of emails from from my customers asking me why textures aren't showing up because they haven't set their maya project so i do have to make sure my my rigs aren't that technical from an end-user point but not on that i mean the people is learning you're learning i mean that's that's the that's a trade-off you need to ask questions and you need to to make mistakes and and learn i mean it's indeed is the best way to learn if it always works it's you're not gonna learn it it fails once you you learn how to do that and it's on your uh toolbox for next time say yeah and um sorry i i think we went in a little tangent here um so just to recap the um so you've been now you're working on on this rigging system and you're using uh i mean you doing uh the uh sorry i forgot the the little girl uh second version of your rig yeah that's the two okay yeah sorry so and um yeah that's that's i mean you i know we talk sometimes on uh uh chats and and that or i follow you and and your uh discord community also that we will talk a little later but so you've been investing a lot of time on this i think it's uh you put in a lot of work on on having this like i would say like very like huge leap on on improvement and everything from the previous stuff now you did like performance and things like that yeah um i go back and forth on whether all of this is worth it because i've been working on this new system for years now mostly just recently because like it was it was while i was employed at other studios when i would just chip away in my free time working on my own stuff at home but uh the the idea is that once like halo 2 is the test bed for my new tools but my new tools will in theory allow me to churn out a bunch of rigs and be able to just go back to any of them after i rewrite like how the arm rig works and just hit rebuild and just pipe it all back through all the characters at once so once this is done it's kind of the bedrock of me being able to make a bunch of rigs going forwards fingers crossed there's still a market because it's very full these days but but uh yeah kayla 2 is kind of just the test bed to get all that all that working which is why she's taking so long to to be done yeah i always think like the yeah you say when you you did bonnie and kayla and and then now they said that's a like few studios or or um uh freelancers that they're creating a lot of like rigs nowadays online like really good ones i'm really impressed i i cannot buy all the rigs but uh i i try to buy from time to time some of the rigs because they are really good there there is there is a lot of value there um the um so let's let's do a little uh change maybe can can can we talk a little bit of your new uh adventure i will say like with uh so it's friggin studio i call f rigging i didn't know it's the the right pronunciation was friggin it's frigging awesome studios but the r is capitalized so it's like a play on words emphasis on the rigging so i'm saying currently african so that's it that's cool and how do you i mean you've been working in big studios for some time and then if you feel like your your heart is going in this path of independent how how come out do you think it's always i mean making making rigs and products online has always been the backbone of my career i mean as as we talked about before it started in college and then kind of kind of you know jump started me uh gave me some momentum going forwards and i always tinkered array tinkered away at it between studio gigs but never really got to go all in on it and i always wondered you know like um am i gonna regret it if i don't give it like a full a full throttle effort at some point and i put that off for a long time because i really specifically liked working at dreamworks um with it's really nice campus great people just you know great job stability and everyone's kind of happy there and once covet happened i kind of lost most of the stuff that i liked about it because you know you're at home you're working without people next to you and it's almost like every job starts to feel the same once you're working from home and so that made it easier for me to say you know what this is kind of the time to take the risk and see what it's like because there's there's way less to lose right now you know who knows maybe i'll get super fomo of everybody going back to the studios in a couple months um but for now yeah for now yeah ideally um but for now i'm just kind of kind of doing the work from home thing and and going uh all in on it and seeing uh just kind of seeing how it goes it's it's a fairly low risk business venture i mean it's basically just a rebrand like nothing's really changed aside from logos and names and you know it's an llc now instead of a sole proprietorship which i mean i i pay people to handle that stuff so i i do not know much about the the business logistics there to be honest but um that's you know you know when it's just more official now but it's still the same products i'm i'm just basically making a public statement of i'm putting more effort into this now and there's there's stuff can you can you plug the website so i i will add the link later but if you want to plug the website we can we can show it to people and so on and somehow somehow frigging awesome.com existed so that's the that's the address you could also go to freakingawesomestudios.com it'll just redirect there but yeah freakingawesome.com or did you want me like bring it up yeah if you want i mean i'm sure i mean just because you're talking about that so maybe the people can have a baseball on that so it's it's a bit easier to make an idea if somebody doesn't know you yet i doubt but just in case um and so basically you you want to focus on um like your products like and training or you're gonna oh you have services there so yeah that's it's kind of like the the back burner the services side because if you go there right now um under what's currently available uh it says rigging is coming soon because my tools are all work in progress so right now it's like the thing i'm most known for i'm not really offering so i'm mostly doing you know occasional freelance gigs for like studio freelance gigs for psyop because i'm just going through their tools and and then just working on this uh between those and i think what i was about to say earlier and totally forgot was um that this is all fairly low risk because i don't have to put money into this business aside from you know buying the uh paying for the yearly llc tax fee and and website hosting basically but it's like i can always just do freelance gigs between there it's just like i now have more time to devote to this but it's not like i'm taking this huge risk and like starting my business and like i don't have any employees so far it's just me um but uh but yeah it's mostly mostly for characters training software um i've only done a little bit of software so far mostly mostly rigs in training but this is great i mean and this is a really great advice for everybody anybody that uh wants to start his own business it's like you don't need to go like full steam on your business you can do this kind of approach and nowadays thankfully with all the technology that we have i mean we can't just do it like work few days a few hours a day in like freelance or something or remote or yeah attend to the studio a few days and you can finger like some time apart to to do your own business and of course if the the business goes well or grows you can maybe just release one of the branches and just pull attached to to one of your incomes or or projects but it's it's i think it's a very wise way to do the things if you really want to do something that uh it's your call or it's your more like a passion that is always dangerous thing that do it in a i would say not safe it's but also like wise way i would say more than safe it's always oh yeah this is your okay this is your characters where you have all the the still using the um uh gun wrote back end yep you just click and it just directs you over to gumroad i've thought about exploring some other alternatives just makes it more complicated on my end to manage it manage multiple uh stores and multiple payment options and stuff especially if i'm like paying royalties to someone that helps me work on one of the characters then it's like doing the math of all these all these different income sources and stuff gets pretty complicated yes uh this is something i i was researching that back in like maybe a year or two years ago because i wanted to do um it was like a tutorial i want to do for um gear and i wanted to to use one model from from my friend and uh i was checking how to do these um like share revenue and there is no nothing in place uh unless that i know yes no options yeah do you know what's the best solution i found i never did it at the end but if someone's curious i you can hide your product from your page and it cannot be searchable and then you share this partners link thing that your someone when it goes through this link it gets six percent of the cell like referrals or something so what i i was about to do is use this referral link as the main link so ensure that all the traffic goes to the link so ensure that my friend gets the this percentage yeah i haven't looked too much into that i think but a lot of people did reach out about that at some point though yeah but yeah i haven't had any major issues with gumroad it's a good platform i i did briefly experiment with like when i was making the new freaking awesome website i initially created it on shopify i think which is a lot more focused on making a store but it turned out their options for digital distribution were just way far behind what gum road was offering so i ended up just making a square space site and and still directing it through gumroad yeah i think one of the greatest thing about gun road it's the the the the people the clients that uh buy your your products you have direct contact to them you you own the contacts right and this is something that not everybody or i think almost not everybody i mean nobody give you that so if you want to make a role like mailing list to some updates in the product something like that you always have the the contacts up hand so you can you can share that with your uh with your cl clients let's say and that remembers me the discord because i i get involved on your a new discord and it was through one of the uh main links that you did on gun road because i'm i'm your client basically so that's something that is very very amazing it was very useful one another thing that's really nice about gumroad that i've unfortunately completely completely neglected over the years is uh i didn't realize how much people just went too directly to gumroad to like find stuff i was just when i started that i was just using gumroad basically as an overlay to charge people who visited my website but eventually i looked under the you know where it shows kind of your traffic and a decent amount of that was coming from just people finding them through uh gumroad so just recently i went through and did like a whole seo gumroad pass of like adding the right tags and making sure the images all look nice and stuff and doing experiments with like searching because like gumroad only lets you add like five tags and they're like official gumroad tags for like categorization like uh if you're seeing this on the left right here uh it lets you sort your your gumroad homepage by tags but if you just add in your product description a section that just has a bunch of random words uh that shows up in searches oh and that so i realized by typing in like yeah if i typed in like girl rig on gumroad i wouldn't see any of my stuff but as soon as i added just an arbitrary section at the bottom of the product description that just said tags ignore this and just wrote you know girl female rig maya it would come up in all these uh all these searches much better wow that's uh i i will check out mine because but i think it's i have i think three tutorials but are uh or two tutorials and one like um it's called like complementary uh files for the ongoing workshop on youtube and uh i mean because uh i think i'm in a super niche like niche of an inch of an itch i i never bothered to to make any say or anything because i mean the people do those for these uh tutorials is people who knows and gear is not like a random uh uh animator or someone who is looking for a already rigged or something you know yeah oh yeah definitely it's a good advice there and talking now that we are here on your products i'm very curious about your character simulation video training series because i think this is very unique and if the people who is um interested on cloud simulation and uh like this technical animation part it's something that um i mean there is not too much out there all right now to learn yeah it's pretty it's pretty limited i'm i have been told after making this that there is there's one that i believe is from noman workshop that's called ncloth for production i haven't personally watched it but it sounds like that might go through the process as well but there yeah there's very few learning resources on just how ncloth and and here or any you know cloud and hair simulations actually work into production pipelines there's like the how to use and cloth tutorials on like digital uh well i'm forgetting it's been so long what would they don't even exist anymore they merged with pearl's light but digital uh do you remember the digital tutorials that yeah uh pluralsight i think yeah but yeah that's how i learned a lot of stuff was through uh through digitaltutors.com and they had a few like you know how to make a cape and simulate it but as far as like creating dedicated cloth rigs and importing them into your animation shots and then blending them over to animation and doing clean up on them it's that's all stuff that people only seem to learn once they get to a studio like at disney i was brought in as a as a character td but it turned out they mostly brought us in to do cloth and air simulation on big hero 6. and they had to teach it to us because you just don't learn that stuff anywhere else yeah especially i mean if they have preparatory systems there is no way of course oh yeah i i did a fair amount of law of cloth and hair simulation when i arrived here in japan and you know one of the things that i like it the most is the uh fixing part i know i don't know actually i i found very um like going in the in the zone and fixing right i just shot the sculpting basically i really disliked the hair because it was a super difficult to to fix hair because all the strength i mean it was super difficult honestly it was but for the cloth that you can kind of uh brush like it's like with the maya tools so i released this uh this tool set called adam polish a little while ago which which is pretty much that like like whenever you go to a studio that does tech adam they basically have to come up with tools that address the same common issues that you encounter like how do you remove wrinkles if there are too many how do you stop this section of cloth from jittering too much how do you get a character's hand to imprint on their cheek when they lean into it but there weren't really any tools like that available to the public so i i just made my own and put them online and there's like a sculpting section where you can like uh just sculpt over time like uh just hit like apply pose to pose and then the next time you make one further along it'll automatically sort of like key in and out of those over time and there's just like these two two attributes here it's a pretty pretty simple tool i've made more elaborate sculpting tools at studios that i i but i i haven't bothered to kind of redo that process here i think this one works well enough and like wrap tools if you want to like you know wrap a piece of cloth to somebody over a couple frames and and stuff like that that's right um i i i do have another uh also named gear but i think nobody use it but i'm um oh that's good to know i didn't i didn't know about it if you have time please check her out maybe you can give me some feedback the um and one thing for instance when you shot the scope one of the things is uh sometimes the you know you have this predeformation and you have later this uh pause the formation blend shape thing that you can um store based on the uh some transformation or you can use the um like uh how they call it um they'll i will call the local transform for for a point so you uh it's it has another name the point space or something i don't know so basically when you have your arm or something and you just called you can for instance this here you can do is call that fixes you mean like it's almost following the normals yes it's a normal base thing yeah it's a i call uh a local reference space because this is how was called in softimage eyes when you want to stuff like that at studios it's been a while though since i've seen something yeah well maya does have it by default but it's use another name it's just i i cannot recall it but anyway the thing is when you go on areas like here that pinch it's super hard to support like more than one frame sometimes a fixed especially with fast movements and things like that it's like you do this super nice the next frame it's yours corrective even if you fade out a little because yeah the normal it's just flipping completely so it's no way to have a nice reference of this mine is just world space and boring but is it's something like definitely it's worth another do you have this included on your uh tutorials on on cloud simulation this part i made the cloth simulation tutorial but so so i had this up and then i had to take it down for some conflict of interest reasons briefly and then i put it back up after i done the tutorial series so the tutorial series doesn't specifically mention this tool but uh you know if you're watching this and have a tutorial series this is definitely a a friendly add-on uh to it maybe there's an idea there for a second part of the tutorials like you can pay me more money to teach you how to use my tools that you also looked about i mean man that's um i mean it's a lot of work to to do the training and yeah it's something more than that sometimes yeah yeah the even just talking to nobody on your when there's nobody around you is so weird to get used to when you're like talking to the computer and for people to hear later and it's not screaming yelling yeah the um the other thing i'm curious i i don't know in in the class um how is the can can you make it a little overview for the people because i'm just curious now i i did watch the trailer when you release it because i received you know your uh like um mainly listing uh but i don't remember it's of course it's only enclosed i guess because it's the one that comes from from uh maya it's mostly encloth there's a little bit of n hair but you know the process of setting up n here in a production is very reliant on like the groom coming in and giving you all these hair curves so it has a brief overview but it is mostly end cloth focus but yeah definitely it's uh i think the skill sets the skill sets thanks the the skill sets uh uh transferred to different solvers i mean it definitely has parts of it where it's like here's what input attract does but you know going from ncloth to another crossover is not hard it's you know it's seven it's 60 to 70 percent very similar do you i did use qualoth i think it's uh it's really nice really stable with intersections and multi-layers yeah i've used squad at two studios and um but i found that it's a bit slower or not of it and then i had a chance to try uh um carbon cloth i don't remember the developer name sorry uh i haven't used it personally it's really i use it just the test just to test a little bit it's really fast it's amazing uh talking with a friend that is more uh focused on on on uh class and her sim today it it only like he likes each depending of the task he wants to do so there is no like one like clearly better for all situations they they have ones that it's more fit for certain kind of simulations and i didn't go out of maya like to check um like what's called the uh they have different strategies i've heard a lot of good things about it yeah and well i did try the marvelous designer one that's it's also really good for what it does i mean as far as i know isn't isn't it currently impossible to cash out the simulations from within marvelous designer because it's all just you know gpu based uh or something unless it's changed you you do you saw this at some point no it's um it's it it's different i mean you you they're getting better with uh especially because they didn't have this pipeline integration python things like that now i think they they added from a few versions and to be honest i didn't make that much of simulation in uh in marvelous a part of the the one that you do for modeling itself because it's simulated the modeling uh but if you see um the work in uh um oh it's called um death i love on robots the the the um the alberto mielgo uh short film uh the uh witness all that it's been done with uh the girl running around the city it's all stylized yes yes that that one um and i had diego that is is the uh close sim supervisor on the podcast if you're curious to check that and they did also the i think it's called uh what watch dogs i think is the game it's called it oh what well they have anyone yeah all this is it's it's simulated on marvel's design and it's i mean it's amazing i mean it's it's very uh it pop-outs i think from other class simulations but i guess depend of the the system for instance i i don't know how it will work with more carton animation you you have to stretch characters so do some kind of like not realistic thing i don't know how i will go i think in clothing cloth will hold this there yeah that's not something that i've ever seen built into a solver i like basically i've seen studios make like at origin on the input meshes or the rest meshes there's like all the stretch is just inherited on this t-pose rig and it just stretches in real time per frame the uh the rest mesh to change the size but uh it was always some custom stuff that was added on top of it i did also a lot with soft image with the side flex that was really fast there is not too much the detail you get it's a bit i would say it's still ice you don't get that many wrinkle details that you can get for with this and cloth but it was really fast that also that's something that i think for cloth sim it's very important the iterations that you do the like you need to try fine tune try fi tune until you you reach a nice balance i guess that's my least favorite part is your favorite part at least no my least favorite part how do you handle that do you batch stuff or how or just like oh like um like wedging yeah is what the every city i've been to they have a wedge tool where you can like you can like send off a bunch of simulations in a row and it'll show like this is with density at point two this is the density of 0.4 i don't know if i'm just too impatient for that i i normally just change stuff and play a couple of frames and see what it looks like and then just keep trying maybe that's maybe that's why it's my least favorite part but that's kind of generally what i've done yeah i i was yeah i think i was more like you trying a bunch of fine tuning things where i get something quick we quickly like playing just a few frames and then when uh i think it's every like i like to do that at the beginning and then uh if i have these tools available to in the farm just pull like 10 different sets and send it and do another stuff those settings especially at least in enclot the settings are so finicky like like uh when i was recording that tutorial series i answered i had to re-record the um the big main section of like you know adjusting your settings to make it look good because the first time it just it went like you changed one setting wrong it's just everything just spirals out of control and it's really useful that you can just bring in those default and cloth settings different percentages like i spent all this time nitpicking and i was like why does this not look good why is it moving too much and then i got like 99 of the way there by just doing a 50 50 blend of silk and burlap or something so it is pretty useful you could just kind of wipe your slate clean with those stable and cloth settings they have built in yeah it's really i think yeah if you if you get your your you need to get some like experience with the solver and then it's kind of more easier because you start guessing more and doesn't need to to test that wide range i remember the beginning was like i don't know what i'm doing just testing like huge amount of changes in one different or i mean one by one different settings then that's something that uh yeah like it's unless for me i found very dangerous when you change different settings at the same time because it's hard to just to see what's what's going on unless at the beginning when you don't know the the solver itself yeah um so yeah that's a if and what is your favorite part on on the closing like the the show the sculpting like you say then yeah i you know depending on who you talk to they all jump to the cleanup phase at different points in the process some people are very sim heavy other people like me tend to be a lot more sculpt heavy i would say i probably jumped to the sculpting side earlier than i should most of the time i just feel more comfortable in that zone because you're not relying on you know it's almost like physics is a dog on a leash and you're trying to like guide it but you don't have complete control over it it's it's own thing but shot sculpting it's like i need this thing to be here i'm just gonna put it there and uh and since i came from an animation background not a technical background uh i i probably will always align myself more with like visual uis and and just you know i mean it is animating like tech atom is animating you're just doing it on a deeper level than someone would with a regular control rig on character um and i i also i really enjoy the process of making tech atom tools i just in in general with like like i'm not a huge programmer i i've never really ventured outside of python and mel but except for maybe a tiny bit with some game stuff that i've experimented with but but i really enjoy automating things it feels very satisfying when when something is like i'm clicking this so many times and then you just just make it work for you and it's been a really fun problem-solving process to make tech adam tools for this atom polish tool set which i wanted students to be able to use which means again no plug-ins and almost every studio i've been at the tech atom tools rely a lot on plugins because maya doesn't have a lot of this stuff built in like like there's this one tool uh that i called subdue in in adam polish which is based on solving solving the idea of how do you remove noise or high frequency jitters from geometry or cloth moving around your scene and the way big studios solve this is they write a plug-in that's actively calculating you know in the background of your scene how do we how do we you know invert these jitters and stuff like that and eventually a couple of years ago you know i was talking to some friends and we realized we could just make this we can just have it like bake this stuff up front and then just turn it into like a real-time uh blend shape so the way subdue works is if i can remember exactly it basically keys every single vertex of the mesh on every single frame and then runs graph editor animation cleanup tools to simplify the curves and then it bakes all of those verts back down uh in a geometry cache and now it's just the blend shape where all the verts are moving like like as much or whatever i see i i visualize that wow but it i mean it's super brute force but obviously we work like happy but it works yeah it will work like and you have all the curves tools to to takes a while to run too i can imagine i mean if you you have like um like a very dense geometry that it's gonna it's gonna have tall oh yeah it's super interesting yeah there's a lot of stuff you can do with with real time blend shapes that are um and i i don't take credit for a lot of this stuff like you know you know we pick up tips and tricks here but there was this one tip i was given once uh i can share the screen real quick just because this is a i think this is a really useful super simple tip where uh one of the most common things you can do with tech item tools at any studio is offset the mesh along the normals and you know paint that in and out i have one in here called uh grow shrink where did my sphere just go it hit it i usually keep hiding that whatever so um basically i i selected virts and it auto painted the map for us but in general it just selected some birds and they're growing along the normals but the way that works is because if you just do a duplicate special with oh god it's been so long since i've done this so duplicate input connections basically meaning if you did this on a skin mesh it would be the exact same thing it would share all the connections and it's moving along so if you do a blend shape from once from the new one to the old one it's going to be a one to one meaning any any changes you make to this duplicate are are going to pipe over in the blend shape and there's this uh i don't even know what it's for to be honest i'm sure it's a modeling thing or something if you go under edit mesh there's uh this node called transform that you can drop down which seems to be kind of a node version of you know manipulating the position of verts and it has uh i think it's the local translate where it's basically just a normal offset and i had no idea this existed in my own yeah so i just learned to assume yeah so it's as yeah i didn't you know someone pointed this out to me i'm just sharing it along but yeah if you just do duplicate input connections and then throw that on there or even like a an average vertices you can then turn it into a deformer by just blend shaping it back so that's what uh that's what grow shrink and iron uh are doing that's just duplicating in the connections and putting either transform or uh move uh or average verts on it and it has quite a few average birds it's brute force super brute force these are all kind of just like fun how can we do this without plug-ins sort of uh problem-solving which gets the job done then yeah i i enjoy making them i think at the end of the day that's the goal it's to to get the job done if yeah if it does it i mean that's super cool thanks for sharing i definitely i'm going to check it out that one and your tool obviously the um i was able to see yeah yeah i one thing i do sometimes is play also with the delta mash delta mesh is very useful i like it due to sculpt so i apply it i just brush up weights or something some parameters there and then bake it out and it also helps a lot to yeah when you have this kind of like weird positions that you smooth out the stuff and i like using it on cloth simulations a lot because it kind of just acts as a remove some wrinkles slider after you simulate as long as you apply it in t pose yes exactly i think maybe in 2020 it doesn't need to apply and depose anymore oh really that's interesting maybe i'm just yeah you would think you would be able to just know what the undeformed yeah exactly i i think or maybe it's more yeah i'm making up this i don't know i i it's still probably useful to apply it in a non-default pose though so you can like steal what it looked like yeah that specific pose or something yeah you can cheat out that also that's cool it's um i don't know if i've ever used it that way but yeah i have tried also like to do but it didn't i didn't succeed to get it but the idea the concept and i'm sharing with you maybe uh you get better results or you find better solution then it's these plane shapes that i was talking like it's hard to hard to hold so i just i have tried to use the delta match as a um just without recovering the delta so it's just a laplacian smooth so it gets all shrinked so when you bend obviously it's like a super clean smooth area and add their doubling shapes you know so basically the the delta mash it's kind of the base of the plane shape in this local or normal space position so it kind of hold but still there is some problems i mean it works partially but when you start moving everything because it works in water space some areas and it breaks that's not something i've really experimented with but that will be really cool i even ordered to do like kind of like a custom blend shape note that applies normals not based on the real position but in a pre-calculated laplacian so and then recover the original pose with one like baked blind shape so when you create new blend shapes it's not calculated on the wrinkle part but it's calculated in a underlying laplacian space that is going to be very smooth interesting yeah i i uh from time to time i i just fine i i think i try a couple of times to to solve this with the default ayat tools out of the box but yes i don't remember exactly but i always hit like this kind of wall where it works oh look at the works here and then i moved all stone broken you know it's not like stable enough in that sound i normally just stick to world space just so it can be predictable yes i mean you have but if you can make it work in the local it can have these kind of advantages the precursor to some of the tools i made later on back when i was at psyop i made this tool called uh x-con for extra controls where you would basically it was basically just creating a cluster and uh doing a apparent inverse matrix thing on it and then getting it to follow along with a custom control that you picked just so you could like say make a make an extra control that follows when the elbow bends or something but it's very uh very very primitive they do have a ride-along soft mod called sticky mod uh nowadays that i use instead yes i use the same or for extra things like that the i i it was back in the day like in softimage times we did one joke it was a joke tool but i found some useful uses for that one that it's the ultimate control and basically run a script and it put one control per vertex wow that's a lot of controls it was like a joke like uh like for the animators hey i did this you have absolute control everything super easy just translate you don't need to even to care because one point so the rotation or scale doesn't affect the point on only the position and then i gave that and man it was not um it was the phones with the camera was these small nokia things that but i should have record the face of the animator when they show it it was like hilarious obviously it was a joke no that's um ultimate control anyway so and um i want just to just maybe for rap like talk a little bit about the um discord community that you you started i mean it's amazing there is a lot of i mean if the people doesn't know yet there is like a lot of people in a very short amount of time i think maybe 600 800 people it's already there mainly focus around uh animation and rigging i would say yes so so i've been part of a couple other uh online communities for both animation and and other stuff you and i are both in like a small slack channel where we talk about different rings ringing stuff but uh i didn't know of uh of a big community well i guess the way i phrase it is that i i was looking for a way to move my uh community base away from like facebook pages and facebook groups because personally i just find so much just spam and useless contents in in some of these you know maya or animation related facebook groups um very uncurated very uncategorized yes um and a lot of it is you know we tune out because it's like we don't want to just see a stream of people in their first week of animation asking you know why is why is this super small thing working we want to be able to go to a place and be like okay this is where you know we can talk real deep ringing stuff this is the section we can go to to talk about you know what animated movies we like or here's where you go to s with the keys and so i ended up creating a discord community just under the studio name it's just called frigging awesome studios if you just call if you just go to friggingawson.com there's a button right at the top or if you're on mobile in the side tab called uh chat on discord and you can just uh join it i i will add the link also in the video description yeah the discord discord links for invites are weird but if you copy the one on that chat on discord button from the website okay so i would point to the website um but yeah it's uh it's going really well uh because i was able to send out an invite link to everyone who's ever uh interacted with my store basically over the past oh god how many years have i been doing this i think i don't think it's ten years yet i launched it in 2014 so you know six or seven years but you know anyone who's ever bought something from me or downloaded something from me i was able to say here's a discord and it got to like six or seven hundred members in the first day which is crazy and right now it's it's like 800 or something but uh it's not that crazy to follow so far there's a decent amount of people that are active there's sections for uh asking for critiques on your work for like animation rigging or whatever else and then there's sections for uh saying uh i you know how do i solve this rigging issue that i had but because those are separate you can also just you know chat about you know whatever other rigging topics you want without having the stream filled with with lots of other kind of spammy uh posts so i think i think it's well curated so far as far as uh there isn't like an overwhelming flow of data if you only want to look at like one specific section but i uh the way i pitches just say it's kind of like an online hub for the animation community you know to just talk about industry stuff or just you know make connections with people play video games together or whatever other stuff you want just kind of a place for animation community to come together online i i have to say it's it's really well organized like when when i register like all the like instructions explanation just said this name or said this or just choose which are your main specialities and all the all the little steps that you you provide it's it's it's uh very easy to to understand and i think i spent like maybe 10 minutes or less and i understood perfectly how was said and i was very surprised because i the moderators are super efficient i just register and i already have my almost like immediately the categorization i wow i was like expecting like it takes forever i i was in another discord that i asked for something and because i want to post something in another channel and you need to ask for permission they uh allow you to to have the right to pose there and i wait for three four weeks and then i quit like annoying after asking a couple of times or so but yeah here was like well impressively fast and efficient um and just for wrap up um what it's the future looking for ah looking oh you said not terrible english it's looking looking like i guess yeah looking like thank you uh yeah but the the the goal for the uh near future is to uh get the the new kayla rig uh done this is kayla two over here uh you can see lots of uh model improvements addressing people stuff people have complained about over the years like the severe angle of her eyes and how you have to like basically rotate at an angle um so her eyes are are not quite as awkward to use now i haven't done the face right yet but uh this is what the the model is looking like she's gonna have like a whole bunch of uh uh different outfits in here like uh if there's a dress and sweater stuff like that whoops um and she's gonna have uh some cool rig improvements for the most part it's a streamlined version of everything you've you've used on the bonnie 2 rig if you've used that um but it should be a real-time rig it's going to be a lot quicker a lot more stable hopefully fewer crashes and there's some cool new features like um uh on the original kayla there was a an age slider uh let me go back to that the original kayla had this uh age slider which people liked a lot where you can change her from age six to age eighteen and it's not really doing anything complicated it's just scaling some regroups under the hood um but nowadays uh because of like the pickers i've been using um there's a lot more flexibility with being able to to combine different uh different customization options like you know swap this texture out make the arms this size um so there will be a nice ui with like uh different options but there's also even if you're just not using the picker there's a whole bunch of customization options to basically make her look however you want you can like scale the arms or make them thicker so i kind of just built the rig with enough nulls connected into like global scale and all that to make sure uh everything is customizable even down to like finger width and height and and uh weird stuff like clavicle thickness and there's just a proxy rig on here right now that's why it looks all uh segmented so in theory she's going to be extremely customizable to look like uh totally different humans there's like spine thickness and and uh so i ideally she's gonna be uh a huge upgrade i i am uh she is a complete from the ground uh uh new character even though she you know looks like kayla so i am charging separate for her but i'm planning to i have a pretty significant discount for anyone who's bought uh kayla one already like as much as i'd like you know just say here's a free upgrade like the amount of time i've spent on this is already like ten times as long as i spent on kayla one so i just it's like i wouldn't be able to make it if if i wasn't uh planning on you know rolling it into my business model but i think it's gonna be a good value especially with the with the discount for existing owners and once she's done that means i can start turning out a bunch of characters i'm not ready to announce which one those are which characters those are but i have a few in the works one of them is about to go into modeling so that that'll be ready as soon as kayla two is done and and there there's some other things i'm dabbling with that i don't know if i'll ever put my my uh my auditory system online i mean it's gonna be so long before it's even you know ready for the public to even make a biped rig with it so it's its primary goal is just you know for me but but i you know one day i might put it out like at least like a beta form and you know just let people get their hands on and give me feedback but not sure i've also i've also dabbled in creating a an encloth and hair pipeline tool to basically create very quickly cloth and hair rigs in maya and populate them into shots and export and import them within shots i'm not sure if i'm going to go through with that because just based on hearsay i all i i feel like the industry's leaning away from maya for cloth and hair stimulation but i'll i'll keep an ear out and kind of see like i know a lot of people are liking vellum and i think there's uh i mean a lot like i mean like and cloth it's i think it's only for maya and uh carbon you have it for houdini but also my they did now for my i mean i don't think it's going away it's just like there is more options now but definitely if you do this pipeline uh that helps process that it's a big uh helpful tool to have it on maya um absolutely i think it's absolutely a good idea i mean i made a ui for it just to like think it out but uh uh we'll see we'll see but uh but yeah making making a bunch of rigs over the next year is is the uh the first uh the first goal here on awesome well thank you so much jose for your time and explaining all thanks for having me that's a wonderful talk thank you

Channel: mGear: Rigging & Animation Framework

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Id: YA5G3lVAFi4

Length: 79min 9sec (4749 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 15 2021