Surly's New Rig -- File Referencing Updates

We have an updated rig for Surly with knee controls (pole vectors) -- located on the foot controls.

Click here to download the new Surly Rig

This is a great next chapter in the wooly world of File Referencing.

Without file referencing, every time a rig is updated, you would have to restart your animation using the new rig.  With a referenced rig, you can usually just replace your reference and keep on trucking...

But what happens when you open your animation file and something has changed that breaks your animation?


This is about to happen to YOU!! :oD


Surly's new rig has a useful update -- now the knees can be animated. Yay!
But the knees in your scene may not behave the same way with the new rig as they did with the old rig. Boo!

Try it for yourself .  Replace the reference and see how it affects your animation.

File --> Reference Editor --> Reference --> Replace Reference --> (navigate to the new rig)

How does the new rig change your animation?
On a production, you would have to tweak the knees to compensate for the new rig update (on your own time, most likely). For this class, you can choose to update and resubmit your file using the new rig, or stick with the old one.

For the run and the jump, I'll be able to tell which rig you used by the reference error I get when your file opens.

We'll move on to the new rig officially starting with the next assignment.

Advanced concept -- 
This exercise underlines how important it is to keep ALL iterations of referenced assets in an archive. If you ended up with 95 versions of a rig, and now some of your older animation no longer work, you may be able to restore them by matching the date of the animation files with the date of the rig that was in play at that time.

The most up-to-date rig is normally saved with the same simple name as the original "surly_RIG.ma" no matter which version it is. The archived copies, however, keep their versioning numbers (ex, "surly_RIG_v002.ma") to keep them neatly organized.  With this assignment, we're keeping our version numbers as part of the reference so that you can use either the new or old rig. 

Questions?