Hello everyone, I was asking myself about how can I help the new artist, ok, I know, I'm a new artist, but I have some experience and knowledge that I would like to have when I was a true begginer, and I decided to do some videos about the bases of rigging.
This is the first tip: Topology, this is the first thing that you would have to take care when you want to do a rig, in this video I explain whats the importance about the topology, and how you can have a different defformation even with the same rig
Remember, a good rig starts with a good topology!
As a rigger you have to understand the topologies and how they works, if you start the rig and then, in the skinning, you see that the topology is wrong, you could lose facial or corrective shapes, also the skinning that is correct, that means that you will lose time and, in the worst cases, you will have to redo some part of your rig. The good thing is that you can fix all of that before starting to work, the only thing that you have to do is to analize the topology before to start rigging. Thats why is so importar that you learn to analize the topologies.
Also, it's important to say that there is different kind of topologies that could works fine for the same purpose, I have seen 2 or 3 differents facial topologies working fine for a cartoon projects, and it depends of every artist or the pipeline in every studio.
It's important to say that usually a good topology for videogames is different that a good topology for animation, also a cartoon project require a diferent kind of topology that a vfx project, that's because a topology could help you to broke the rig in more extreme positions, or could help you to make more realistic deformations.
More information:
In my case I love to work in cartoon projects, and for me (and a lot of artist) the perfect topology for this is the topology that you can see in the book "the art of moving points" by Brian Tindall, you can download a example with a beautiful topology based in this book here:
Advice:
If you are a modeler and you want to work in cartoon projects, try to study and copy the topology of this model, if you are a rigger try to rig this model, and you will see what kind of beautiful deformations you can do.