Character Rigging for Production in Maya
In this Maya tutorial, we will cover tools and techniques for setting up character rigs in Maya. Software required: Maya 2011.
What you'll learn
In this Maya tutorial, we will cover tools and techniques for setting up character rigs in Maya. Step by step, we'll construct a control rig that is robust and animator-friendly. We'll learn everything from proper joint placement and techniques for correcting a joint's orientation, to learning fun ways we can preserve volume as our mesh deforms and how to make our controls efficient and easy to comprehend. We'll also learn how to build some fun MEL tools that will help speed up our workflow, bringing that time back into constructing our control rigs with the best methods. Software required: Maya 2011.
Table of contents
- Prepping Our Scene 11m
- Creating a Renaming Tool 11m
- Building the Left Leg Joint 8m
- A Technique for Re-orienting Joints and Finishing the Leg Joints 18m
- Setting up Foot Roll Joints 11m
- Creating a Tool that Generates a Box Curve 7m
- Scripting a Joint Curve 19m
- Constructing Foot Controls 12m
- Setting up the Foot Controls and Rigging the Toe Bend 9m
- Rigging a Foot Bank 9m
- Finishing the Foot Bank Rig 10m
- Adding Knee Controls 4m
- Establishing Knee Association Curves 10m
- Writing a Script to Generate Joints on Each Selected Vertex 16m
- Building the nSpine Joints 9m
- Adding in a Spline Ik and Initial Connections of the nSpine 9m
- Creating Upper Body Control Curves 10m
- Starting to Add Twisting to Our nSpine 7m
- Setting up the Initial Twisting in the nSpine 14m
- Completing the Setup of the nSpine Locators 10m
- Choosing a Stable Rotate Order for Control Objects 4m
- Finishing the nSpine 6m
- Building the Shoulder and Arm Chains 10m
- Building Finger Joints 11m
- Rigging Shoulder Controls 14m
- Establishing Ik Arm Controls 7m
- Adding Elbow Controls for the Ik Arm 4m
- Establishing Elbow Association Curves 5m
- Dynamically Parenting the Arm Controls 9m
- Setting up Ik/Fk Switch Controls 10m
- Building Fk Controls of the Arms 12m
- Finishing the Fk Arm Controls 12m
- Dynamically Orienting the Fk Arm Controls 7m
- Creating a Tool That Parents Shape Nodes 13m
- Starting on Finger Controls 10m
- Finishing the Finger Controls 10m
- Building Arm and Forearm Twist Joints 11m
- Establishing Arm and Forearm Twist Controls 11m
- Wrapping up Our Forearm Twist Rig 9m
- Rigging the Left Arm with an Automatic Clavicle Feature 13m
- Setting up an Automatic Clavicle on the Right Arm 8m
- Building the Neck and Head Bones 5m
- Establishing a Head Control 7m
- Dynamically Parenting the Head Control 3m
- Creating Facial Joints 6m
- Renaming and the Facial Joints 5m
- Building Facial Controls 10m
- Adding Parent Controls to Our Facial Rig 7m
- Wrapping up the Facial Controls 5m
- Blinking the Eyes 11m
- Constructing Eye Controls 8m
- Dynamically Parenting the Eye Controls 4m
- Starting to Rig the Eyes 6m
- Finishing the Left Eye 4m
- Finishing the Right Eye 7m
- Cleaning up the Scene and Adding a Global Control Curve 10m
- Adding a Character Set 4m
- Binding the Character and the Magic of Dual Quaternion Skinning 8m
- Binding the Eyebrows and Blocking in Weights with Dual Quaternion Skinning 8m
- Refining the Deformations of the Head 5m
- Finishing the Weights on the Left Leg 8m
- Wrapping up the Weights on the Left Hand 6m
- Adding and Editing Influence Objects 8m
- Finalizing the Left Arm's Weights 5m
- Painting Weights on the Neck 4m
- Double-checking Deformations 5m
- Mirroring Skin Weights and Finishing the Character Rig 8m
About the author
Delano works avidly as an animation author at Pluralsight. Starting his career at animation studios like Shilo, Delano has developed a strong passion for his talents. His animation and rigging background help him teach and create some of the most-watched training on Pluralsight. A few of his favorite projects that he has contributed to include: Character Interaction in Maya and in Softimage, Rigging the Human Face in Maya, Rigging Sea Creatures in Maya, and Rigging and Animating Transforming... more