Easter Project 01

For Christmas I got a DVD about rigging in Maya, for the newer kids, rigging is the setting up and structuring of your characters skeleton. The skeleton bones and controllers are the tools you use to manipulate and pose your 3D character. Ever since then I have been plugging away at a rig in my spare time. Why? Well I think its important for those of you with high end 3D (film and TV) aspirations to be able to have a go at animating with a professional standard rig. The problem is that in the limited time you have to work with 3D in our course there's no way most of you could explore rigging in enough depth to build a skeleton like this.

I'm giving this one to the Tafe so you can all have a play with it. In fact as long as you prove to me that you understand and can apply basic rigging techniques, then you can use this rig to bind your character too (if you want). Here is the first piece of test animation I've made with the rig, the animation is nothing that fancy (an afternoons work), but you can see that the rig has stretchy limbs, and the arms can switch between FK and IK*.

* FK is forward kinematics which means controlled from the shoulder down, IK is inverse Kinematics which is when you control an arm (ar any limb) from the other end (the wrist in this case). Each set up has its own strengths and weaknesses, so its good if your rig can switch between the two.

1 comment:

Lisa said...

um, what's the DVD called Ian and where'd you get it? looks pretty neat for us outside of TAFE too :-)