Amanda Rabade

I spoke with an old friend of mine yesterday about my thesis worries, mostly the time constraint. James Johnson, a character rigger and technical artist, gave me some advice on how to go about my thesis project. I told him how one of my goals for my thesis was to show that you can achieve an efficient and effective stylized rig without needing any custom scripts or plugins, just using the tools and features that are native to Maya. In my mind, that meant doing everything manually, down to creating a parent constraint for each control and joint. Unfortunately, that is a big time drain; he agreed. So what’s the solution? Automation! There is no reason as to why I need to do everything manually, especially if there is a script that can do the same thing in the click of a button. Just to be clear, I’m not saying find someone else’s script online and have it do my whole project for me. Let me break it down:

The most time consuming tasks for riggers tend to be the most repetitive such as:

• Creating custom controllers
• Adding multiple of the same constraint
• Creating multiple of the same setup (ex. stretchy limbs, IK/FK switch, etc.)
• Adding custom attributes
• Setting up foot roll

You get the idea. All of these tasks can be done in Maya manually without any scripting or plug ins needed, but it would take a lot of time. So why don’t I just automate the mundane tasks of my project? I already know how to do it by hand, and I understand how it’s supposed to work, so if something goes wrong I can fix it.

Basically, James suggested I automate the surface and joint set up so I can actually spend my time working on the real time consuming part: sculpting the additional heads for Billy.

Being a rigger isn’t just about knowing how to rig. It’s about understanding sculpting, topology, anticipating problems animators will run into, and so much more. This project alone has taught me so much already, and I’m not even at the halfway point.

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Today, James gave me a little demo on how I could setup Billy’s eyes. I deconstructed his file and was able to recreate it myself.

James’ Eye Set Up:

• Create 2 null groups
  • world_type_up_grp
  • skull_surface_normal_grp
• Point constrain the eye control to skull_surface_normal_grp
• parnet constrain skull_surface_normal_grp to eye_geo_grp (offset group for eye geometry)
• Geometry constrain skull surface to skull_surface_normal_grp
• Normal constrain skull surface to skull_surface_normal_grp
  • world type up should be set to object up
  • world up object should be world_type_up_grp
    • (these will appear in the options menu for normal constraint)