Rig it Right – July update

[image error]On vacation this week and finishing up this month’s quota from the front porch today. The writing went much better this month. Two chapters (and images) complete. I finally conquered a workflow issue I had in Maya that was frustrating me. Trying to explain the outliner vs node editor gets me (and the reader) down into the weeds a little too quickly. So, I pulled in the hypergraph hierarchy window and kept use of the connection editor and that helped out a bit.  In chapter three we go over connecting user created controls; up until now we’ve been rigging 1990’s style where the animator has to dig about in the outliner.

Rules covered in chapters three and four:

Rule #4: Keep geometry (GEO), controls (CNTRL), and skeletons (SKEL) in separate groups in the outliner

Rule #5: Make controls that make sense to the animator

Rule #6: Happy math—controls and joints should be zeroed out

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In chapter 4 we go over adding custom attributes and my favorite: the utility node. In this chapter we go straight to and stay in the node editor.  Here is where the wobbly riggers will need to re-read a little bit and work to become comfortable in the node editor until it looks more familiar and less like a bunch of spaghetti connections.

Moving along now.  A weekend and then to the August page quota.