Vasil Shotarov is a Rigging Artist for the highly acclaimed Blue Zoo Animation Studio. While following Raffaele Fragapane’s “Cult of Rig” Vasil realized that he had been very wasteful using constraints in his rigs: “I have always known that they are slower than direct connections and parenting, but then I thought that is the only way to do broken hierarchy rigs”. Inspired by Raffaele’s use Maya’s matrixMult and decomposeMatrix native Matrix Nodes, Vasil looked for opportunities to use Matrix Nodes more for common rigging tasks.
“Since then, I have tried applying the concept to a couple of other rigging functionalities, such as the twist calculation and rivets and it has been giving me steadily good results.” Vasil mentions of that endeavor.
With that, have a look at Vasil Shotarov’s journey into swapping Maya Matrix Nodes instead of using constraints. There is a nice look at creating a node based matrix constraint, a matrix twist calculator that is perfect for character forearm rotations, and using matrix nodes for rivet functions (coming soon).
The results of all these experiments prove to give the same results as using constraints in a rig, and are much more computationally efficient methods.
Cult of Rig is a live series covering how to produce high performance, feature rich rigs from absolute scratch. Not to be missed!
