I am horrible at creating rigs/Need help

hansedr

I SUCK at rigging. Plain and simple. I use maya 2008 and I have watched the DT training video at least 3-4 times and my characters never work. My clusters always disappear when I delete history (as the video says), joints will not deform properly even though I have oriented (spelling?) them, paint weights to verts for deform, do I use FK or IK. Does anyone have anything simple I could follow to learn rigging better. The best one I have found is the simple game rig tutorial with the fox (not sure if you know which one I mean). Also, when you create a animation, how do you save that animation to bring into a scene? For example, let's say I create a walk cycle and want to bring that into a scene where the character walks down the street. Do I copy the animation keys or import that saved file. Any help would be cool.

Rob Galanakis

If you are serious about learning how to rig, get the Gnomon Workshop or Digital Tutors DVD's. If you have tried rigging and can't grasp it, the videos will go over everything you need to know. It sounds like you're struggling with some fundamental concepts so you need some expansive and fundamental answers, unfortunately more complete than a forum post can provide and more comprehensive than you will find from many online tutorials (though there are some very good free Maya rigging video tutorials, I'd suggest looking around if you absolutely cannot fork over the cash, but the DVD's will be cheaper for your time in the long run, anyway).

MoP

Make sure you use "Delete only Non-Deformer History" instead of Delete History, otherwise you will delete all your skinning, which it sounds like you're doing.

With regard to merging a character with a scene (I assume you mean a separate scene in Maya, not a different program or game engine), you can use the Create Reference command in the File menu, and add your character animation file as a Reference, so anything you update in the character file will be automatically updated in your scene.

hansedr

Cool, thanks for the input everyone.