Goals:

• Rig a diverse, easy-to-animate character for student use

• Ensure the character can smoothly move into Unreal Engine for rendering purposes

• Work with a test animator to implement animator wants and feedback to get the best user-experience possible

An introduction animation for Emerald, by our test animator, Lily!

The Emerald rig is part of RIT’s Character Mosaic project, which aims to address the lack of diversity in animation by providing inclusive, interesting, and easy-to-use rigs for animation students to use in their storytelling. I’ve been the rigging artist for Character Mosaic since the summer of 2024. Emerald is the first rig to come out of the project and has already been used in several RIT student films and animation assignments. She’ll be available for student use beyond RIT very soon!

Emerald is an entirely joint-based rig, meaning she’s super easy to bring into Unreal Engine via the FBX import pipeline. This was a challenging parameter, as the FBX Maya to Unreal workflow doesn’t natively support many of the deformation features available in Maya. However, we wanted to prioritize the use-cases for this rig: students with single- or double-semester turnaround times on solo film projects that couldn’t afford the hours required to render in Arnold. We had just seen the close of the render farm at RIT, and many students were turning to real-time rendering, but had the most hangups at the point of bringing their animations over from Maya. Emerald directly addresses this issue and offers a straightforward import/export process, while also being flexible enough to tell their stories and practice quality animation.

While making Emerald, I got to continue to tune and use the Python scripts I’d been writing to expedite different parts of the rigging process. I also had the opportunity to work with a test animator—other than myself—for the first time on a rig. She would stress-test the rig at key intervals and give notes on poses she was having a hard time achieving, controls she thought unintuitive or hard-to-find, and a wishlist of extra features she would be looking for if she were to animate a shot (or an entire film) with Emerald. These back-and-forths contributed to a much stronger rig that keeps its animators in mind.

For more information on Emerald, and the other character’s we’ve made on the Character Mosaic project, check out our website (coming soon!) Keep an eye out as well for some upcoming press on the project from RIT!