Development of my 3d rigging skills

My love for rigging has developed greatly over the past year. I began learning the discipline of rigging at the end of first year with the e4 ident project. I find rigging very logical and simple, when i say simple i do not mean easy. I mean that if there is a mistake it is because i have done something to break the logical structure of the rig.

This is one of the main things i love about rigging (among many). Any rig is possible essentially, its just the problem solving ability to make it work practically. This is also why programming is important to learn as a rigger because having a knowledge of programming opens up Maya and lets you fine tune any aspect of the program to make rigging easier and do things which would otherwise be impossible.

One important thing i have come to learn when learning programming alongside Maya is that Maya is just code visualized. The tools inside Maya are just functions. Realizing this made me implement the script editor more when using Maya, especially when rigging.

I made quite a few rigs this year, ranging from quick simple rigs to very complex rigs. I have been told not to get too far ahead of myself, as i have a very ambitious nature but this is the best way of learning, just jumping in and figuring every problem out until the project is finished.

Rigging has illuminated an aspect of myself which i had previously not given much though to, my problem solving ability. This is going to sound very pretentious but i believe i have developed my problem solving skills through rigging and real life problems and the development of these two different aspects of problem solving are intertwined, indifferent. By improving my rigging work i have improved at handling life and visa versa. This implies that the skills used for rigging are quite foundational and cross-disciplinary.

Starting with my first exploration of rigging from the end of first year. This rig was very basic, with simple FK controls and very basic blendshapes. Despite the rig being very basic it planted my feet into the fundamentals of rigging and wanted to learn as much as i could about it from that point on.


At the start of second year, i created rigs for the character and narrative module. I started exploring some more intermediate rigging techniques, such as IK chains, combining blend shapes for a full facial rig, and starting to use set driven keys for custom movements.

 
After character and narrative i spent alot of time learning about new rigging techniques and new parts of maya which i'd never touched before, such as the node editor and the script editor (which are now a big part of my workflow). I began playing around with rigging techniques on cubes, just to experiment and explore.

My next rig was for COP. I wanted to make a stable but advanced facial rig and i would say i have achieved this. This rig exposed me to various problems and in turn solutions, which added a lot of snow to my rigging snowball of knowledge. I solved problems such as adding squash and stretch to my rig, constraining joints to a surface. The amount of problems i had on this rig was ridiculous, but I'm grateful because it means i have learnt a lot more.

   
I intend to improve my rigging skills constantly over the summer and over third year and build a massive snowman (really good rig) as evidence of my increasing snowball of rigging knowledge.