Manual Rigging Fundamentals

Here’s the most basic of animation rigs in Maya. A good starting point for those new to rigging. With no control curves just joints we can still animate with rigs like this though super cut down. Very simple fk joint setup for the upperbody and ik legs. Enough to get started and skim to see what rigging’s about.

Skinning Fundamentals in Maya. We’ll cover the main tools like assigning skin weights, the paint weights tool and component editor, and the editing of skinning in general. Lots of advanced tips on this page too using the regular Maya skinning tools.

Joints the most fundamental node in rigging is a good one to understand completely. First we look at pivot placement in characters which is one of the most crucial elements of rigging. Then we’ll see how to create joints with the correct alignment, a very fundamental rigging page.

One of the most frustrating aspects of rigging is rotations. Unfortunately rotations aren’t as easy or as intuitive as they might seem, so this class explains the important are of Euler Rotations otherwise known as Gimbal Rotations. We’ll see why this method is popular with animators and how it works, it’s downsides and potential workarounds and fixes.

We’ll look at curve controls in this page. Controls make it easier for the animators to use and there’s a variety of setups we can use since there’s no specific control type in Maya. There’s a few things to remember. Once we’ve built a number of curve controls the process can be very easy and is scriptable for automation later too.

This class covers the use of the channel box, adding new attributes and how they can help us. Then we use what we’ve learned so far to create a Reverse Foot rig setup. This is the standard foot setup in any human leg and comes with a few interesting tricks to learn.

Now we’ll discover spline IK. This is how we get joints to move like curves such and tails, tentacles, hair, rope and spines. We’ll take a look at clusters which are objects that drive the cv points on the curves and we’ll make a simple spine setup.

Now we can build a full rig with a few more features than the rig in week one. This class takes us through the process of creating a more advanced rig. There’s a lot to keep track of here but it’s great to see that we can now put it all together and create a more production ready rig. Although this rig is still simple we’re really starting to get into rigging here.

This class takes us down the rabbit hole into the core of Maya Rigging by touching on nodes which will start to allow us to have a lot more control in a variety of situations. We’ll also discover aim constraints and create a IK FK switch setup.

Blendshapes are key to deformation in Maya and allow us as artists full control over the shapes we’d like to hit in our posing and facial animation. This class covers the fundamentals of how blendshapes work in Maya, the key elements we need to know so we can get started with having full control over our deformation and character meshes.

An old page but still a good one that goes into the manual methods used to create corrective blendshapes. Correctives can help us sculpt deformation based on the poses of characters to work around skinning issues so we can control the look of poses on characters. This has now been replaced by the Braverabbit SHAPES plugin but some good foundations to explore in this class.

In the last page of this series we’ll talk a little bit about Pose Space Deformers which are used with corrective blendshapes to get around gimbal issues in the deformation of our characters. Then we’ll move onto a quick look at how autoriggers have really changed the way we rig. Giving us access to a lot of advanced features at the click of a button. A must have for those who want to rig characters easily without the tedious setup times required in rigging.