For Those about to Rig - Part -1

Hello Folks!  

                Let me say my warm welcome to the folks who enters into the area of Rigging. Almost six more years over for me in Rigging and still working on.. Damn I wish I may work with Binku Mathews in the future.. Who is he..??  He was my colleague My Team Head a Good friend and my Anger Management therapist anyway loads of thanks to this guy I’ve learnt a lot about Rigging from him. I thought this small tutor that I have done could be helpful to the one who is willing to learn about Maya Rigging. Soon I will be posting some interesting rig workarounds..

Hope this helps u in anyways.. Cheers!

MAYA RIGGING      (Character Setup)  

Introduction 

Very Interesting and most challenging and a special subject to work with it requires your creative and technical, Observation skill set to complete this process

Rigging or Character setup is nothing but giving life to the characters provided with some Controls to make animators life easy. Rigging comes just before the animation stage. When the character or prop model is created, it cannot be animated until the rigging gets over because it remains as static model and it's impossible to animate the model just by moving the vertices, it requires Skeleton structures to bend or deform the model. 

Maya Provides Various Rigging tools to get the results that you want. Understanding these tools is very important for the beginners. 

Concepts &Production Workflow

Skeletons (also known as joints and bones) are the important objects that are available in most of the 3d applications to simulate the real human skeletons and also there are different Deformers such as bend, stretch, squash, …etc. to simulate the different deforming effects. 

First key thing is that the person who wants to become a rigger is to understand the Human and Animal Anatomy well (Human and Animal Rigging methods are also known as biped and quadruped Rigs) and he also needs to have in-depth understanding of the muscle deformations and the behavior of the muscle system to get the desired results. It’s also very important for the rigger to know about the mesh flow of the geometry, which is called mesh topology (There should be a good two-way communication between the modeler and rigger). 

It is the modeler’s responsibility to give the right model with right number of polygons and points placed in the right places; for example where ever the surface need to be bent (such as the arm pits, elbow wrist, knee, ...Etc) or deformed, should have the enough number of points to control the deformation in a right way. 

It is also the riggers responsibility to check the model first whether it has the polygon distributed correctly and has the enough number of points to get the right deformation. Remember it's always better to check the model first before you blindly start working on the rig. This avoids re-doing the rigging process especially when your working on the bigger / multi projects in the production houses. 

go to part-2..