Karen Halliwell Rigging #1

Recently we had professional rigger Karen Halliwell from Cinicite in for a rigging masterclass in Maya. I learnt a lot from the session, especially about how rigging is done professionally.

We started rigging a leg, taking it slow to get all the structure in the outliner correct, keeping it uniform and under organisation, it's very important because it allows problems to be identified quickly and fixed.

We also learnt about control groups, Karen taught us about a reverse foot setup. 

This starts out by adding the joints and naming them as expected, then creating IK handles to set up the initial control.

The interesting part is grouping the IK controls together, in several layers. This lets you control the foot around different pivots; for example the toe pivot group was centred on the toe, and the heel pivot on the heel, rotating each of these groups would rotate around the centre of that group, allowing the animator to rotate the foot in different ways.


Next came the controllers, and with that, Offset Groups. This was a method of not translating controllers directly, but putting each one within its own group to move it to its neutral position. 

This is better than moving it and freezing the transforms because it means the controller has no changed values form when it was created.

Also the global controller has been added, and the leg has been made into a "pack" which groups every part of the rig for the leg.

I found the packs work really well because if I needed to change this leg from the rest of the rig. I could easily remove and rebuild it without affecting any of the other parts of the rig, making it possible to swap in and out parts of a rig easily, something that could save a lot of time when changes need to be made.


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