Early work from a friend showing the chaos they witnessed when switching to splined keys, and after re-ordering the rotation of the shoulder controls. Good default rotation orders are incredibly important but often forgotten about, sometimes even in high quality rigs. Please don’t just think of rotation orders as un-important or a black-box that can’t be understood! A good default rotateOrder setting could be the difference between a rig that’s a joy to use and one that makes an animator want to tear their hair out. ...
This is a quick Maya character rigging tip about how to rig perfectly spherical iris and pupil scaling in your characters, using only a single skinCluster and some basic nodes. ...
This is a short set video demoing the Moana face rig. It’s just quick demo but is just enough to glimpse some of the rigging concepts in use and reference the facial topology. ...
This is a short set of videos demoing the rigging techniques and process of creation for the Vittorio rig from Hector Abraham Torres. While they aren’t in depth, just seeing the general idea is often all you need to get going. If you’re interested in diving in deeper, Hector teaches rigging workshops on his site. These videos are all originally from his instagram ...
This article introduces the concept of using Spline Basis Functions for rigging, allowing for “curves” that also include rotation or scale! ...
This article shows how to recreate the behavior of a parent constraint with matrix nodes. This method is superior as it also handles scale and shear gracefully. Note: Make sure rotateOrder is connected, as the issue mentioned in the article has since been fixed. ...
Extracting a twist value from a control is a common need, this article shows a very simple (but very robust) quaternion based method (Quaternion Swing-Twist Decomposition). Note: The Quaternion Swing-Twist Decomposition in this article is the same concept as what the Maya Pose Interpolator uses. ...