Daily #9: Maya Rigging

I’ve been really impressed with the quality of the free tutorials provided by Autodesk on Youtube. Today I worked through the videos covering rigging to get a feel for how all the different animation approaches work in Maya. I’m not an experienced rigger, so understanding their approach also taught me a lot about the techniques involved. I’ve also been reading through Jason Gregory’s “Game Engine Architecture” which has a great section covering everything from blend shapes to skeletons to skinning. I highly recommend the book as a whole as it has great insight into the technical challenges involved in each facet of game development.

Not much to show visually for today, so here’s a picture of a something I threw together in Houdini in an attempt to mimic the approach used in the last daily: