A question I get asked fairly often is what to show on Rigging demo reel. It's a tough question with no single correct answer, mainly because 'rigging' as a term covers a few other facets such as creature FX/simulation, scripting/tools, game integration. So in general, rigging reels typically fall into 4 catagories:
1) Deformation rigs
-how well your anatomy holds up on your character, from skinning, extra joint setups, blendshape and muscle solves
2) Automation
-How quickly can you build rigs (biped, quad, vehicle, prop), start to fall more into tool/tech/pipeline/coding
3) Game Ready
-Working with Unreal control rig, meta human, exporting from maya to unreal, in engine simulation of flaps/hair/fk chains
4) Face Rig
-Joint based, FACs shape, stylized/cartoony
Do you know which one of those roughly appeal to you?
Next, which could be a topic in itself, is who are you applying to? Having even a rough idea of what studios or projects you'd like to work at will help you focus the time you have. Want to work in games? then integrating your rigs into the engine is a must. Commercials/smaller FX houses, Deformation and Automation. High end VFX, Deformation/Automation/Face Rigs. So look at the companies or medium that interests you and see what kind of output they have, so you can work in a simliar vein.
Once you have a general direction of interest and application, begin building aspect that would work in their pipeline. Look at behind the scene footage, show breakdown, making of's and see if you can see how their rigs work, tools they used and so on.
For someone who wants to work in games, I would recommend the following, as the goal at this point is to demonstrate to employers/companies that you can work to their needs and have experiences with enough facets of the pipeline/process.
'End to End' Tools: A modular based character rig that can take a biped from model to Unreal in X minutes
'End to End' Tools: A modular based character rig that can take a biped from model to Unreal in X minutes
Steps to demonstrate
- Joint creation
- Control creation
- Skinning
- Apply mocap
- Export to Engine
- In Engine Secondary
This positions you to be brought on early to help with proto typing or mid way if their in-house team has animations but can't get them into the engine, or late game to help with simulations inside the engine.
Show that you can write the tools to fit the needs of production: clean UIs, modular, naming, solid design, etc
Once you can get a single character that far through, then you branch out with call outs or highlights from what you found interesting:
- Joint creation: your own custom joints for rendering, or the UE5 template
- Control creation: pretty standard, but maybe you have something special
- Skinning: automated twists, correctives, blendshapes, etc
- Apply mocap: apply a full set of anim clips (idle, walk, run, jump, punch, etc) and export them as fbx in a batch so when brought into a UE project with your own template the character is immediately playable
- In engine secondary: go nuts on jiggle physics, hair, cloth, multiple layers, etc
- Face Setup: good to have as well in a demo to know that it's there
Also, just get a character model that interests you and get going, don't spend time modeling it yourself.
Hope this helps, good luck on your journey!
