Book Review: Rig it Right! Maya Animation Rigging Concepts

Rig It Right! is a wonderful hands-on tutorial book on rigging using the Maya software. It's written by Tina O'Hailey who has taught at Disney, Dreamworks and Electronic Arts.

There are three parts to the book with 19 chapters. The first part has all the basic concepts, which are all the tricks and techniques of the software and how you can use them to rig. Second part covers the rigging of a biped, from head to feet, and wings (see the bird on the cover?). Last part are on advanced techniques, basically additional techniques to achieve particular rigs, movement and controls that aren't achievable with basic rigging.

It's hands-on tutorial style from the start so it's quite easy to absorb what's being taught. There are accompanying screenshots but they can be a bit too small at times though, making it difficult to see the pop-up menus, but they are in the easy-to-follow instructions anyway. The text is written in a conversational tone which is quite a pleasure to read.

The link to the tutorial files are located at the back cover. There are 17 rigs used throughout as examples.

It's a great book to get to practice and improve on your rigging.

Here's the list of chapters and what you can expect to learn:

1. Props, Pivot Points, Hierarchies
2. Deformers
3. User Controllers
4. Utility Nodes and Custom Attributes
5. Joints
6. Blendshapes and Set Driven Key
7. The Biped
8. Skinning
9. Upper Body, Lower Body, Root: Always Have a Cha-cha
10. Feet and Knees: Simple, Group-based, and Joint-based Feet
11. Spines: FK, Spline, SDK (Set Driven Key)
12. Arms, Elbows, and Clavicles: Single-chain, Triple-chain with Wrist Twist (SDK or Cluster)
13. Hands: SDK, SDK and Keyable CNTRLS
14. Eyes, Blinks, and Smiles
15. Master CNTRL and Scale-able Rigs
16. OMGimbal Lock
17. Advanced Controls
18. Stretchy
19. Broken Rigs and Dangly Bits

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Focal Press has provided this book for the review.

Rig it Right! Maya Animation Rigging Concepts (Computers and People) is available at Amazon (US | CA | UK | DE | FR | IT | ES | JP | CN)

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