This question is for animators that have been doing this for a while. I am a learning animator, and I have been learning for about 9 months, I have chosen to go the cut out route because I like the complexity of it. From concept to finished without IK it takes about 4 days to build a rig and thats with about 30 mouths, 30 pairs shoes, 10 sets of hands, all with a mouse and keyboard. My question is how long does it take to build a full rig, from drawing to full turnaround, with all the mouths, shoes, hands, you have the drawing already scanned in. now you need trace it on the computer, cut it out, distribute to layers, and build a hierarchy how long does it take you, any professionals out there? Let me know Thanks
Hey gabe!
Good question. Having worked in rigging for a while myself, I would say that starting from scratch, 4 days sounds reasonable.
I’ve seen rigs that could be done in half a day and others taking up to 2 and a half weeks to complete! Of course, a lot of factors can come into play. Complexity of the design, quality of the animation, amount of drawing substitutions required to draw, general experience with rigging and creating systems, etc…
Looking forward to see what others think. Keep up the good work!
There is a really big range of time. I’ve worked on very simple shows that are built for a lot of re-draw and I could rig an entire episode in a week, including props, characters and backgrounds.
I’ve also worked on shows where they have very elaborate costumes and a rig can easily take a week.
And I’ve done rigging development which can take several weeks to determine exactly how the rigs should be set up.
There is no right answer here. It takes as long as it takes. So don’t feel pressured by time. It’s better to do twice as much work in the rigging stage, and have a really clean happy work flow during animation.