Creating several characters from one rig

Hello everyone,

I am working on a project with a whole bunch of characters to rig and I am getting close to having done the first one including different views. Now, I wonder if there are any complications if I turn this character into the next one. They only have slightly different body types, so with replacing drawings and pivots this could be possible.
To me this seems to have the advantage that all the patches and reach behind stuff is already plugged up. But what happens if I drag two rigs that are so similar into one shot file? How can I make sure that there are no problems with equal layer names? Get mutual colors imported twice? Will both rigs be able to use the same animation templates if they are only different in the drawings they contain?

I would highly appreciate if anyone could share their experiences with such a workflow.

Thank you very much!

We made only one rig for our 4 main characters, The Rig have all drawings for all 4 characters, each character has it’s own colour palette.
It is a Huge rig, since we had to foresee all possible variations, but since all characters have the same body structure (changing only the hair stile, some clothing details, etc…), It is possible.
We put the rig as one group on the library, So every time we put a rig on the scene, ToonBoom Renames the group with “_1”, “_2”, etc…
Inside the groups, the layer names does not change, since each layer will be connected to its own network inside the group.
We just rename the group to each character’s name, and start animating.

One good workaround for this if you do run into this problem is to rename the cloned pallete, and use the color override module to assign priority for each rig. :slight_smile:

One thing I would strongly advise is using a completely separate palette for each character, not a cloned palette or one modified from the original.

This is to prevent a situation where you want to change a character’s (let’s call him Bob) hair without at the same time changing another character’s (let’s call her Jane) shirt color. Be aware that the colors are references by their “magic” numbers (under the hood) rather than by their RGB values.

That’s aside from the obvious thing of needing to rename pegs and elements in the rig to “personalize” them for each character.

Ah good… that makes sense. I will make completely new palettes

Will animation presets still work if the pegs are renamed? I suspect it doesn’t.

Thank you so much for your response! I highly appreciate it :slight_smile:

You can do what you ask, but you’ll need to have everything very well organized.

I use to do that all the time. In fact, I have a template character rigged with empty drawings which I use again and again.

But you will need to adjust the bones or deformers (I use deformers) and its pivots to the dimensions of every character.

It is enough if you just change the name of the peg at the top of the hierarchy. For instance, you can have your rig under a peg called “main”. Like…

_Main
__Torso
_____arms
_____head
_____etc.

Then, you can use the rig on different characters by just adding a peg with a different name at the top. For instance…

Tarzan
_Main
__Torso
_____arms
_____head
_____etc.

Jane
_Main
__Torso
_____arms
_____head
_____etc.

Once you have that, start drawing every layer and adjust the pivots or deformers to each drawing.

If you have an animation that you want to copy from Tarzan to Jane, you can do it. Just collapse the Main, copy the keys and paste them in the collapsed Main of the other character.

But keep in mind that both hierarchies have to be EXACTLY the same. As soon as you change the name of a layer or add a new one to one of the characters, it won’t work. As I said, it’s a matter of planning everything well from the beginning…

Also, keep in mind that an animation that you copy to other character only will work the same if both characters have the same dimensions. The animation of a walk that you do to a tall character will work very weird when applied to a short one.

Hope this helps.