In this course, we will cover tools and techniques for setting up character rigs in Maya.

Step by step, we'll construct a control rig that is robust and animator-friendly. We'll learn everything from proper joint placement and techniques for correcting a joint's orientation to learning fun ways we can preserve volume as our mesh deforms and how to make our controls efficient and easy to comprehend. We'll also learn how to build some fun MEL tools that will help speed up our workflow, bringing that time back into constructing our control rigs with the best methods.

Lesson Outline (68 lessons)

1. Introduction and Project Overview
2. Prepping Our Scene
3. Creating a Renaming Tool
4. Building the Left Leg Joint
5. A Technique for Re-orienting Joints/Finishing the Leg Joints
6. Setting-up Foot Roll Joints
7. Creating a Tool that Generates a Box Curve
8. Scripting a Joint Curve
9. Constructing Foot Controls
10. Setting up the Foot Controls/Rigging the Toe Bend
11. Rigging a Foot Bank
12. Finishing the Foot Bank Rig
13. Adding Knee Controls
14. Establishing Knee Association Curves
15. Writing a Script to Generate Joints on each Selected Vertex
16. Building the nSpine Joints
17. Adding in a Spline IK / Initial Connections of the nSpine
18. Creating Upperbody Control Curves
19. Starting to Add Twisting to our nSpine
20. Setting up the Initial Twisting in the nSpine
21. Completing the Setup of the nSpine Locators
22. Choosing a Stable Rotate Order for Control Objects
23. Finishing the nSpine
24. Building the Shoulder and Arm Chains
25. Building Finger Joints
26. Rigging Shoulder Controls
27. Establishing IK Arm Controls
28. Adding Elbow Controls for the IK Arm
29. Establishing Elbow Association Curves
30. Dynamically Parenting the Arm Controls
31. Setting up IK/FK Switch Controls
32. Building FK Controls of the Arms
33. Finishing the FK Arm Controls
34. Dynamically Orienting the FK Arm Controls
35. Creating a Tool that Parents Shape Nodes
36. Starting on Finger Controls
37. Finishing the Finger Controls
38. Building Arm/Forearm Twist Joints
39. Establishing Arm/Forearm Twist Controls
40. Wrapping up our Forearm Twist Rig
41. Rigging the Left Arm with an Auto Clavicle Feature
42. Setting up an AutoClavicle on the Right Arm
43. Building the Neck and Head Bones
44. Establishing a Head Control
45. Dynamically Parenting the Head Control
46. Creating Facial Joints
47. Renaming and the Facial Joints
48. Building Facial Controls
49. Adding Parent Controls to our Facial Rig
50. Wrapping up the Facial Controls
51. Blinking the Eyes
52. Constructing Eye Controls
53. Dynamically Parenting the Eye Controls
54. Starting to Rig the Eyes
55. Finishing the Left Eye
56. Finishing the Right Eye
57. Cleaning up the Scene / Adding a Global Control Curve
58. Adding a Character Set
59. Binding the Character / The Magic of Dual Quaternion Skinning
60. Binding the Eyebrows / Blocking in Weights with Dual Quaternion Skinning
61. Refining the Deformations of the Head
62. Finishing the Weights on the Left Leg
63. Wrapping up the Weights on the Left Hand
64. Adding and Editing Influence Objects
65. Finalizing the Left Arm's Weights
66. Painting Weights on the Neck
67. Double-checking Deformations
68. Mirroring Skin Weights / Finishing the Character Rig

* Project files are included



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