Simple rigging for squash and stretch – Autodesk Maya 2012


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Using a pre-rigged ball with auto-squash and stretch, this tutorial will teach you basic rigging by deconstructing the rig. This should give you just enough to get started in analyzing and understanding what rigging is all about. This video assumes you have only the most basic skills and although it covers a lot of material quickly you should be able to get through it and pick up something new. You can download the sample ball and spring used in this lesson here: hhttps://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/8509389/ball.ma

A follow-up video with no audio is “Analyzing an online rig to understand how it works”. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x4i64_vRW9E

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8 responses to “Simple rigging for squash and stretch – Autodesk Maya 2012”

  1. Why does this rig need to be so complex? I made a rig that does the exact same thing with 3 nodes: Null node on top as grandparent that controls movement (just group the ball to itself), the ball object itself as parent that controls rotation, and squash handle as child that controls squash and stretch (and you can freely rotate it to hit side walls as well). I feel the squash and stretch deformer actually looks better and has more controls than the lattice squashing as well (go figure since that's what it was made for). Took me 2 minutes, shrug. I never understand these overly complex rigs with clusters, orient constraints, expressions, programming, etc.. I guess it's great for the 1 in 1000 people in CG art that want to become riggers for their entire careers (which actually most jobs of the people I've worked with in gaming are given to actual programmers), but for the rest that just want to understand how hierarchies work and to move on to animation, this seems beyond absurd. But to each their own.

  2. I found a much easier way actually for linking the circle with the control point, just shift select the circle and the control point and press p. I'm not sure if there are limitations this way but for a simple sphere it appears to work fine and its quick and easy!

  3. this sucks. I've been using maya for 3 years and I get the gist of everything your doing but you cant just navigate around as you normally would. maya is a HUGE program and not explaining what you're doing as you're doing it defeats the purpose of a tutorial. try again

  4. Ok so the "little tool" to select lattice points? Do you need it. What do you actually do there? You create a cluster or something? Why? I don't see you parenting anything to the ball. Or using any joints. How did you bind the circles to the lattice or the ball to make them deform. Need a bit more explanation during the video what you're actually doing. I'm missing a step somewhere because I did everything but moving the nurbs circle isn't doing anything. Also, can I use this setup in a ball and tail rig? I don't want the tail to squash with it but I want it to move down from the center when the ball is squashed. Is this possible?

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