The blog begins

I decided to start this blog to document, among other things, my learning progress in Maya rigging. I think there's a kind of distrust of people who are self taught at anything, particularly when they have no education background in what they're teaching themselves. Probably for good reason, since it isn't easy. And too many people lie.

I'm learning Maya rigging and MEL scripting because, well, just being an animator isn't good enough anymore. At least not if I want to gain employment in Los Angeles, where I live and where the people who seem to be the best at everything tend to congregate. While I know something about rigging from years of experience with Softimage and Alias Poweranimator, there are a lot of new tools available these days, and MEL commands offer a whole new level of controls I can add to characters, using tools I'd never have guessed existed. I'm pretty excited about this.

I've put off learning MEL scripting because it's completely antithetical to artistic thinking. But now that I'm getting into it, it satisfies some part of my brain that enjoys solving puzzles. So does rigging a character. You figure out what result you're looking for, and work backwards. Breaking the problem into a series of smaller problems and solving them one by one.

The learning resources I'm using at this time are The Jason Schleifer Rigging Bundle and Mel Scripting for Maya Animators.

I'm not following these references sequentially. Instead I decided to start by actually rigging a character. The character, KrazyCat (kind of a "Bill The Cat"-esque character), is one I actually bought since I feel that modeling a character from scratch at this time is just a distraction from my ultimate learning goals. I've changed the model somewhat to make it more amenable to animation.

In this first pass, rather than starting by building a rig from scratch, I decided to start with a rigging tool called Final Rig. I rightly figured I could see what features existed in a modern rig, and modify it piece by piece with my own ideas. Eventually, when I've settled on the features I want in a rig, I'll build a new one from the ground up with my own built from scratch rigging script (for which I've already started writing the base scripts).

I started all this about two weeks ago, and wish I'd started earlier.