Clarafi

Creating animations for scientific visualization often requires the use of custom rigs in order to manipulate the complex models we often encounter in our work. Standard entertainment industry tools and techniques that are often appropriate for characters and creatures are usually insufficient for visualization which means that we are required to build our own rigs. Building custom rigs demands a deep understanding of the Maya rigging and animation toolkit. This tutorial takes you through my process for creating a rig to animate a coral polyp that blends direct keyframe control with organic Maya Nucleus dynamic motion. The chapters in this tutorial go step by step through the process from building the virtual skeleton, to skinning geometry to the joints, to creating custom controls and attributes, and incorporating nDynamic hair curves into the rig. Along the way I demonstrate best practices for keeping the complex rig neat, orderly, and easy to use. The tutorial also covers using Maya shelf buttons and a limited amount of MEL scripting as a way to increase the speed of rig set up and reduce the tedium. The emphasis of the tutorial is on helping you understand Maya rigging technology so that you can design custom rigs for your own projects that will facilitate your ability to create compelling scientific visualizations using Maya.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Understand the need for creating custom animation rigs
• Learn the how to create a skeleton for a multi tentacle organism using joints
• Understand the various options for skinning geometry to a joint skeleton
• Learn how to skin geometry to the skeleton and the benefits of different skinning methods
• Understand skin weighting, influence objects, and blend shape deformers
• Learn how to to use Forward and Inverse Kinematics
• Learn techniques for creating ergonomic animation controls
• Incorporate nDynamic hairs into Inverse Kinematic controls
• Learn how to create custom Maya shelf buttons from snippets of MEL scripts

TABLE of CONTENTS