The Art of Rigging: Volume 1

by Kiaran Ritchie

The Art of Rigging, volume one, is a beautiful text printed at the highest quality in full color. The text presents what is often considered to be a confusing topic in a clear and concise manner that will truly benefit both students and professionals. Because each chapter is designed to become progressively more advanced, readers can quickly find the information they need regardless of whether they are at a novice or professional level. Included with the book is a DVD-based training course with over 30 video lectures spanning every major topic from the book. This DVD is an unprecedented value giving readers over 9 hours of quality training material at no extra cost. The DVD features many Maya scene files, including many original creatures (and their rigs) that were designed especially for this book. To help prospective technical directors learn how to harness the power of Maya's Embedded Language or 'MEL', every chapter in The Art Of Rigging includes full coverage of the creation of a custom script. Line-by-line breakdowns help to demystify complex script creation and will inspire readers to get started writing their own Maya programs. Seasoned MEL scripters will benefit from getting an inside look at alternative programming techniques. No current MEL texts include in-depth discussion of advanced techniques like file I/O, recursion, multi-dimensional arrays and matrices.

Genres: Art

251 pages, ebook

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Should be required reading for any Maya technical artist. Hands down the best book on character rigging I've read. One of the main reasons is that this book is aimed at an intermediate to advanced level audience, so it doesn't spend the first half of the book on foundational things its readers already know. This first volume focuses on six main topics: an ideal biped rig, squash and stretch, automated secondary movement, facial rigging, tool scripting, and pose-space deformations. Each concept is extremely well described, and the supporting digital materials are exceptional (a complete set of video tutorials to accompany each chapter are included). I will no doubt be continuing to refer to this book as a reference for years to come.

The only minor complaint I had with the book was the level of detail the author went into with the explanations of his MEL scripts. At the end of each chapter, he practically provides line-by-line explanation of his script. I would have been fine with a few pages of well commented code. Perhaps this would be more useful to readers without a programming background, but I would guess most TD's and technical artists reading this are already pretty strong programmers.

One logistical note, this book is published by CG Toolkit, and as of 2013 is only available as an eBook from their website. I purchased it there and they gave me a download link for a .rar file of the book and supporting files. Sadly, the rar was corrupt, and after contacting the site, I received no response. The only way for me to actually get the book I paid for was via a torrent I found from a Google search. It's unfortunate because this is a book everyone in the Maya community should be reading, and the publisher should not be getting in the way of that.