Advanced Skeletons vs Mgear - Online Tutorials

dg3duy · September 16, 2024, 11:26pm

Advanced Skeletons vs Mgear Tutorials

I’m honestly quite disappointed with how little information there is for a beginner who wants to learn Mgear from scratch.
I honestly don’t see the youtube channel mGear: Rigging & Animation Framework as a good starting point for a beginner.
Very long and outdated videos, official documentation is incomplete.
Maybe they will answer me that the official channel videos are enough to start with, more material is missing, character guides to download, basic character videos, props rigs, etc.
The solution I had was to buy a course and follow step by step, then plus the youtube videos solidify the basics, I do not see that it is the right way.

Kosta · September 17, 2024, 10:27am

My personal experience is as follows…
I’m not a rigger but an animator. I wanted to be able to build my rig, so I started learning mGear in late 2023.
I admit it was not easy, but I am happy to say it was exactly as it should be!
What does that mean…
If I compare what I learned from the book in 1999 to what mGear currently offers, it is ten light years ahead. It requires me to persevere, think, and make countless attempts. Now, I’m very happy with what I can do just for one day.

I say all this not to dispute your opinion but to show you another way and use my experience to reach the goal.
I wish you the same because it brought me much more than if I had a step-by-step explanation for everything… Now I can say that rigging is pure art because it is the excellent team responsible for the code

chrislesage · September 18, 2024, 12:06am

I don’t learn well from videos, so I found the videos tough too. But I just watched through them all and took notes. I built components and played with them. I made observations and I made even more notes.

For me, that was the biggest thing. Notes, notes, notes, and playing and tinkering. My advice? Don’t try to rig the character you need and let yourself get stuck on one thing. Make some throwaway test scenes and just build a bunch of different arms and see how they compare, for example. And just experiment.

I know there could be and should be more documentation. As an open source project, this is something that anyone could step up to contribute to. In 2019 I was just a confused beginner user too. (Though I did have a long background in rigging.)

Milio · September 18, 2024, 1:14pm

Same here! I’m coming from animation into rigging, although my personal experience is a bit different:

I was a very happy Softimage XSI user for many years before migrating to Maya and found the concept of guides>building rig familiar and I embraced having that in Maya. For many years in the studio, I combined animation with technical animation, mostly using our tools and auto-rigger and I’m pretty confident this helped me out when using mGear the first time.

A bit later, when working on smaller studios and teams, I needed to find a friendly rigging solution. I tried Advanced Skeleton, but at that point was pretty unstable and fell short in features.
I tried mGear and loved it… the components, the RBF! For many years I used it with no scripting knowledge, adding manually all rigging missing from building the rig… Just “recently” I started learning enough Python and using the pre/post scripting side of mGear…a life changer.

I understand for beginners mGear might be quite intimidating and documentation might be not enough.
For me, watching Miquel’s Workshop: Data-Centric Rigging was enough to start creating all sorts of rigs
and get myself sorted.

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9LaIDCCDjfimQVcMdh0rG0MPabPG9FK-

Also found the videos with new updates, shifter components, new features on YouTube and a few mGear stuff in gumroad very useful.

As Chris said, is a good idea to start with simple stuff, and understand the philosophy of the tool and the way it works. Rigging is quite a lot about trial and error, and the same when using mGear, combining components and experimenting with them and the tools provided.

It is well known, not only regarding mGear, that documentation is always scarce… I have to blame myself a bit for this when offering my free mGear rigs and scripts to the community but usually doing little about documenting the rig features, the building process etc. Something I should improve in the future…

I will end up saying that, this site, the mGear forum and the mGear community made my life easier every time I struggled with some issue. Thank you very much for the help during all these years!

Chris_NtBerg · September 18, 2024, 1:21pm

Same here - I don’t learn well from videos so watching them, taking all the notes I could and then tinkering with just adding a guide and building it, testing what it does and then playing with it was how I learned mGear.
The videos are solid. Especially the face-rigging ones and the more advanced techniques like ghosts etc. It’s just not how I learn.

I am an animator but love tech - so I just played with it until I built some understanding. I also pieced together a whole bunch of rigging knowledge from paid and free courses. I don’t think you can just do the mGear course and learn how to rig. Last but not least, I made a whole bunch of mistakes and learned to fix them - and I got to work with a very demanding animation team. I never learned to build and fix as many features in such a short time again

@chrislesage is absolutely right - as an open-source project, you can ( and maybe should ) support the project by making tutorials and helping to extend the documentation yourself. Especially because your mind is still fresh on all the things you just learned.

The forums and all the online-community help made everything so much easier with mGear and I am very very glad you’re all around whenever I hit a rigging roadblock

I don’t understand the “vs Advanced Skeleton” in the title. I couldn’t find good docs for Advanced Skeleton, only video tutorials. I think their system is a lot more ‘simplified’ and does everything for you making it a little easier to learn ( which has a few huge drawbacks ). As a more expensive and commercial solution that’s what they aim for I’d guess.

chrislesage · September 18, 2024, 9:02pm

Agreed here. AS can make rigging much easier. But it also can give you a complete block when you don’t follow it exactly as the guides need to be. I found it much more difficult to customize and fix.

Chris_NtBerg · September 19, 2024, 1:17pm

100% - that’s why I use mGear. It is much easier to automate, customize and fix in a customStep. ( And I found AS rigs to be incredibly slow and carrying a bunch of ‘junk’ in their rigs, no matter how simple. )

Miquel · September 23, 2024, 11:25pm

Hello!
First of all, I agree that the current documentation is old and It is a long overdue now.

I am planning to update Documentation and videos on the youtube channel as soon as this year, but first need to finish mGear 5.0 (This one is a big update since we are removing pymel dependency). also we are working on ueGear for Unreal Engine.
Documentation as usual will come last, but the goal is to have it for the release date.

Regarding the current videos on youtube, I think the introduction ones still useful. My recomendation to start will be to watch this playlist in order:

and of course this forume and review the old threads is a great source of information

Anyway, thanks for the feedback, I am taking notes