Good morning,
The game studio I work at hired a new Tech Artist who is a superstar with Advanced Skeleton. We are now discussing whether we should switch rigging systems. Help me add some Pros to the mGear column, please.
Hi Alon,
I like Advanced Skeleton for some purposes. (I haven’t used it since 2022). I found my major issue with it is that it seems very specific. So when I needed to customize it, I ran into a lot of weird orientation issues that can be difficult to fix. The hierarchy is quite convoluted.
It took quite a bit of effort for me to figure out how to do something as simple as add a separate hip joint to adjust the bottom of the spine in the quadruped rig, beneath the RootM or COG or whatever it’s called. And I found it difficult to adjust the quadruped feet vs. ankles.
And since it is MEL, sometimes you end up with errors that don’t give any information. There were a few times, I had to roll to a backup, because the rig could never build again. And all it said was // Error
or something.
The developer was quite responsive in my experience.
But if you’re making rigs that fit the templates it ships with, I do think it can be less effort than setting up a full Shifter pipeline. Even if you’re using Advanced Skeleton, you can use all the mGear tools, like the skinning export, shape transfer, and basic stuff like that.
mGear/Shifter is great because so much of the pipeline can be automated, and re-used in a semi-modular way. (Like you said!)
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