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Rigging the Rigging: An Animation Friendly Rope System for The Sea Beast
Daniel Sheerin, Joshua Beveridge, Enoch Ihde, Stirling Duguid, Brian Casper, Andrea Parkhill, Ed Lee, Carlos Fraiha
Procedural length-preserving rope rig handling over 5000 ropes on the hero tall ship in The Sea Beast with intuitive animator controls.
Abstract
This talk presents an animation friendly, procedural solution for animating ropes in the movie The Sea Beast. With over 5000 ropes on our hero tall ship, we embarked on development of a better rope solution for our animators. The resulting rope rig would allow our animators to interact with ropes using intuitive controls, while producing complex shapes and preserving length. Character interactions with ropes were easy to produce, and stretchy, rubbery ropes avoided. This new rope rig was critical to the believability of our world, considering the massive number of ropes, in so many shots. With this new rig, we were even able to final some shots in animation, without having to simulate the rope dynamics at all.
How to read this
- Category
- Production talk / rigging breakdown
- Contributions
- A procedural, length-preserving rope rig deployed at scale (over 5000 ropes on one hero ship)
- Intuitive animator controls that produce complex rope shapes and easy character interactions
- Enough animation control that some shots could be finaled without simulating rope dynamics
- Context
- A production rigging effort for The Sea Beast, sitting in the lineage of character-friendly procedural rig tools that aim to keep dynamic elements controllable by animators rather than left to simulation.
- Correctness
- Studio practice, not peer-reviewed; results are production-proven on one film's tall-ship shots, so the approach's generality beyond ropes and that show's needs is not established here.
- Clarity
- Accessible; a single first pass conveys the workflow and intent, with little formal math to revisit.
- How to read it
- Read once for the workflow and the animator-control philosophy; focus on how length preservation and shape control are exposed to animators, and watch the accompanying video for the believability claims.
Related work
- Skunk: DreamWorks Fur Motion System 2019 / DigiPro
- Improv: A System for Scripting Interactive Actors in Virtual Worlds 1996 / SIGGRAPH
- Real-Time Motion Retargeting to Highly Varied User-Created Morphologies 2008 / SIGGRAPH
Keywords
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