Getting Started with Aniseed

When you first launch Aniseed, it will look like the image shown below. This is what you will see when there is no rig present within the scene.

The menu at the top allows you to create new rigs, switch between rigs in the scene as well as exposing various bone mand shape manipulation tools.

Creating a new Rig

Click File/New Rig

This will ask you for a name for your rig. This is simply the name it will assign to the rig node adn you can change this at any time.

Your tool should now appear like this:

"Rig : MyExampleRig" is our actual rig. All components we create will be a child of this in some form. The "Rig Configuration" is a special component - all rigs MUST have a "Rig Configuration" component. By default Aniseed will create this for you, however if you're working in a studio pipeline where you dont want a rig configuration or you want to specify your own to be created automatically you can do this through the preferences (Edit/Preferences).

If you select the "Rig Configuration" component you will see that you are presented with all its options. This allows you to tailor the conventions the tool will use when building the rig.

Components may expose any (or all) of the following:

Requirements

These are fields that you are expected to fill in. They are typically mandatory for the component to build and usually represent objects which that component needs.

Options

These are fields that allow you to tailor the result of the component. This may allow you to change the behaviour of the component or the naming of the component etc. These are usually predefined with default values.

Outputs

These are fields which the selected component promises to populate as part of its execution. Typically with requirements (or any field that expects an object), you can chooes to either enter the objects name, or you can provide an "address" to an output field. By using the address you're not hard coding the naming convention into your setup. This is covered in more detail below.

Adding Components & Building

This is the absolute minimum for a rig - if you right click the "Rig : MyExampleRig" you will be presented with a context menu. From this menu you can select "Build", and that will execute (build) all the components declared in the rig. In this case, nothing will change in the scene, as the only component (the configuration component) does not actually do anything in of itself. However, you should see it go green to say that it was successfully executed.

Right click the Rig node again, and this time choose "Add Component". This will present you with a dialog showing all the available components.

As well as showing you all the available components, you can click a component and see any help text that component offers. Some components will also expose some of their options to you through this dialog as well. Its worth noting that any options you set in this dialog can be changed later too.

Example Workflow

To demonstrate this, select the "Mechanics : Two Bone IK" component and set the location option to "md", then click "Add". This will add that component to the aniseed stack. Now you can click that component and see that it requires a Parent as well as a Root joint and a Tip joint (as shown below).

All three of the requirements for this component require "objects" (i.e, nodes in the scene). This field has two buttons next to it, the button highlighted in orange will fill the field with the selected object whilst the butten highlighted in yellow will select the object in the scene. Start by selecting the rig node in the outliner and then clicking the "Set From Scene" button. This will place the nodes name into that field.

Now draw three joints in a hierarchy within your scene. Select the first joint and fill in the "Root Joint" field, then select the last joint and fill in the "Tip Joint" field.

Lets go ahead a test our rig - right click the "Rig : MyExample" section at the top of the Aniseed tool and choose "Build/Build Rig". You should see the components go green and a set of IK controls built around your skeleton.

This is the most simplistic way of using Aniseed, where you're working with the stack as a Linear Execution Stack (i.e, building all components from top to bottom).

Iterative Building Workflow

In reality, when we build rigs we rarely get things exactly as we want them first time. Quite often we will want to rebuild our rig, then change some settings or extend it further and rebuild it again. This process is usually repeated a lot during the lifespan of a rig in production - and it is why dedicated rigging tools such as Aniseed exist.

Therefore, simply executing all components from top to bottom is not incredibly efficient. If we take the example above, if we hit build again, we would end up with another set of IK controls for each time we built our rig. Therefore it would require the rigger to clean the scene up each time.

This is why Aniseed allows you to execute "sub sections" of a stack rather than the whole stack. This way you can group your stack its different sets of functionality which can be invoked for different purposes.

You can see this in practice if you right click the "Rig Configuration" item and choose "Create Initial Component Structure". This initial rig structure is intended as a "good practice starting point". As you can see in the image below, it defines an inital rig structure - this just creates a series of group nodes to help keep our skeleton, geometry and controls seperate from one another.

We then have a "Make Rig Editable" section. This has nodes which specifically look over the control rig, store shape information and then delete the control rig.

The "Build Control Rig" does what it says on the tin. This section creates a global control root, re-applies control shapes and applies control colours.