Genoma
Introduction
Genoma introduces a new way to rig your characters that is fast, flexible and intuitive. With its system of preset rigs and rig parts, people new to rigging can avoid the hours and even days it can take to get a usable result and users who are already expert riggers can benefit from the time saved by quickly creating the base rig to expand on and being able to save to the Genoma preset library for future use.
In contrast with traditional autorigging systems, Genoma is fully extensible. If the built-in biped isn’t enough for your multi-armed warrior priest, you can start with the basic biped and add all the extra arms you require. Genoma takes advantage of all of Modeler’s tools to shape and reshape the rig to suit your needs and has none of the limitations associated with Skelegons of old - such as orientation. Associating weight maps has been made easier and the controls for Genoma rigs in Layout make animation easier too.
Genoma is a system that embeds additional information into skelegons to allow them to be converted to more than just a set of FK-controlled bones in Layout. Rig information is stored in the object file and custom rigs can be created, modified and saved in the proper folder as Presets, so they can be recalled any time they are needed.
Genoma is designed to remove the need to deal with the complexity that rigging normally entails while permitting extension and exploration. For the first time, the user doesn’t need to delve into the bones of their creation. The aim with Genoma is to give the user the power to create intuitive controls for their characters and let Genoma worry about how to perform the actions requested of the rig.
In short, Genoma could be the starting point for an expert rigger who wishes to add more control to their rig and a destination for a user keen to animate without having to learn rigging first.
Genoma 1 and Genoma 2
Genoma is in two versions, one doesn’t replace the other. Genoma 1 is great for rapidly applying preset rigs to characters for quick animation, whereas Genoma 2 is more of a rigging development kit. It has considerably more power and can even handle changes to rigs that are already animated, but with great power comes more complexity and so Genoma 2 might be overkill for simple rigging, however once rigged and saved as a preset the Genoma 2 presets need no more expertise to use than Genoma 1 presets. Both will be described in the documentation of course and there will obviously be the possibility for overlap between both rigging systems.