Transition from modelling to rigging question: How to?

[SenhorSaint]

Hi guys,

So I've just finished watching the "Creating Cartoon Characters in Maya" tutorials and completed my first ever character model.

I now need to rig the character. Are there any tutorials that goes into the specifics of making the transition from the modelling to the rigging? I know there is the "Introduction to Character Rigging in Maya", which I have started to watch but the character is a little different to work with and doesn't account for all the loose shapes I have. The follow-up tutorial to the one I've been watching until now "Cartoon Character Rigging in Maya" is a little too advanced.

I have about two dozen separate shapes all correctly labelled and grouped in my outliner including socks and sleeves and the hands, shoes, the eyes etc. So basically where do I go from here, do I need to turn it all into one shape, if so how etc?

Cheers!

[dan]

Hey SenhorSaint,
Welcome to the DT community! Have you checked out the Maya Rigging learning path? That would be a great place to start getting familiar with rigging in Maya.

[SenhorSaint]

Hey dan,

Thanks for the reply. I've been following the learning path you suggested and I'm really enjoying going through all the tutorials.

I have been using Maya 2008 at home because it's the version on the lab computers at Uni but I'm thinking of switching to 2012 to use the Interactive Skinning method. If I make the switch and use the interactive skin bind will I experience any problems when I try and open the scene in the 2008 version lab PCs?

Lastly is there anything specific I need to do before I try and open a 2008 project file into a newer version (2012 for example).

Thanks!

[dan]

Happy to hear you're enjoying the learning path!! When you go to File > Open in Maya if you open the option box you have the ability to ignore version. That will tell Maya to ignore what version the scene was created in, so that way you can transfer it between Maya 2008 and Maya 2012. The only thing to keep in mind is that there have been a lot of improvements from Maya 2008 to Maya 2012, so if you are using a new tool or a new feature from Maya 2012 that is not in Maya 2008 then when Maya 2008 tries to read the code from that Maya 2012 scene it won't know how to handle it. After all, it can't predict the future.

But for the most part, it's pretty good handling things between versions. I don't have Maya 2008 on my system at the moment and I haven't tested to see how the interactive skin binding feature will be if you try to open it in Maya 2008, but off the top of my head it wouldn't surprise me if you'd be able to open it but you'd lose the interactivity of it. That is to say that the interactive skin bind feature is really just a smooth bind, which exists in Maya 2008, but there are extra controls in there so you can control the weights interactively instead of painting them. So my thought would be that if you created something with interactive skin bind in Maya 2012 and opened that in Maya 2008 with "ignore version" checked, you'd just have to go back to painting weights instead of interactively adjusting the bind.

[SenhorSaint]

Thanks again dan!

Did what you said and managed to open my scenes on the older version just fine.