Making A Control Creator For Character Rigging

This week’s agenda has been another adventure into Pymel and the efficiencies I can achieve by applying my scripting experience into rigging. 

As you can see in the image above, I’ve begun to learn how to place buttons in a UI layout within Maya. Pymel is a pretty welcoming language, but I hope whoever came up with the layout commands jams their toe on a doorway tonight… Why was this created like this?! Maybe I’m being too critical of something I’m still learning, but I rode the struggle bus for hours. There’s nearly no decent videos on this topic and the documentation is vague in the important areas.

So, I’ve made a mental note to make videos covering the subject in detail in the future. As an up and coming technical artist/character rigger, it’s your duty to make the path to being proficient in the industry a little less bumpy on your way up. If it’s not, it should be. That’s my opinion at least…

Anyway, into the details of the overall plan.

The posts that follow this one will be more detailed about how each part is made.

Toolsets in Maya can be extremely helpful by minimizing time spent doing repetitive tasks. As a character rigger, your goal is to provide a system that is intuitive from the animators perspective. In order to do that, consistencies need to exist in the rig you create.
If an animator hops from one character to another and the icons are all different, operating in different ways and randomly colored, you’re asking for trouble. Or you think it’s funny to watch others struggle to make something great and that makes you just– you’re just evil.

Therefore, toolsets are created. If you use a standard toolset to make the rig, you’ll be using controllers that’re clearly defined. Well.. Hopefully, the toolset gives that level of detail. Aside from that, it’ll also limit errors made on the rig if the same steps that’re usually repeated multiple times are scripted instead.
I can’t be the only one that’s gotten to the polishing stage of my skin weights only to realize that I never froze transforms on the finger joints…

In conclusion

As I said earlier, the posts that follow this will go into detail on the various parts of the toolset that I’m creating. I’m not sure I’ll release the full code when it’s completed, but I’m planning to share the journey as I create it. I’m still learning Pymel and my code will have plenty of reasons to return to it and make it more efficient. With some luck, sharing the iterations will provide a good source of information for you and others to create their own.