Hey folks! Josh here from Rigging Dojo, writing to you from Viborg, Denmark. I am out here teaching rigging to the 2nd year CG students at the Animation Workshop for 3 weeks along with a good friend and assistant teacher, Kasper Larsson. I wanted to take the time to give you some thoughts as I take myself back to the basics of learning rigging and attempting to explain it to a fresh set of eyes.
And let me tell you… It’s not that easy. My maya muscle memory (read that as muscle memory… not maya muscle…) is stamped into my fingers and brain. I still use some marking menus that existed back in 2014 and before, and have been changed/removed since then; but on every install and new version of maya, I re-implement my go-to hacks, override scripts, and marking menus. Doing a rigging demo without your “stuff” is painful! But guess what? I get to re-learn Maya a little bit because of that, and that’s a good thing. It’s also a good teaching tool to show the mind of a rigger/tech artist/wizard. “Oh, I’ve used a tool to do this for 10 years… um, let’s see if I can figure this out ‘by hand'”. Boom!
It’s another reminder that we never stop learning. 15 or so years of doing this, and I’m still learning stuff. I learn from the students I teach, the teachers I teach with, Chad, Brad, and other mentors, and everyone back at Brazen (my new job!) too. And as Maya gets another upgrade this year, we will all have to learn a bit more on how to do things the “new” way, see if the ‘old’ is still effective and efficient, and adjust accordingly.
Here’s a few topics that I want to highlight for those that are learning rigging for the first time… dig into these through the many resources online, including our own courses!
- Understand Joint Orients
- Naming, Naming, Naming
- Understand hierarchies and relationships between objects and nodes
- Dig into the Maya Docs!!
- Don’t be afraid of scripting, it is not hard to learn and will save you so much time in the future
- Use anatomy reference. Also look up Hippydrome.
- Download a free rig, check out Morpheus 2.0.
- Know what animators need – try animating!
- The concept of a “spine” rig can be used everywhere!
…And for those that are a little more seasoned (or maybe new to 2017 and beyond) –
- Explore the shape editor. No more messing with cvShapeInverter or *insert your own custom plugin here*
- Blendshape nodes have had an overhaul and a much needed cleanup!
- The Pose Interpolator is interesting and i’m still learning it’s nuances. It’s like a built-in RBF node / pose driver
- Workspaces are neat, and the UI enhancements (everything draggable/tab-able) are great. Totally (finally) customize your interface based on what your workflow
- Shrinkwrap has been there for a few versions now, and if you haven’t used it – try it. It’s quite useful
- I’ve got to bring up the shape editor again. Editing shapes, creating shapes, adding inbetweens… it’s all very seamless and editable right on your skinned mesh
- If you are getting a weird lag in your scene, disable the MASH plugin (if you aren’t using it, obviously). It seems to cause some slowness sometimes.
- If you’re using the shape editor and creating a blendshape on a skinned mesh, do not use poly operations with history
- Shape editor again… it can auto mirror blendshapes, even on asymmetrical meshes.
- If you haven’t used them (they’ve been there awhile now), the transform constraint options in the move/rotate/scale tools are very handy
- If you haven’t seen the charcoal editor for maya, it looks super slick!
That’s all I’ve got for now. Happy Rigging!