Week 1 — The Pipeline, the Concept, and the Rig Spec

Unit 1 Overview · Course Home · Next: Week 2

This week

You will find out where rigging sits in a production, learn the two conventions this course runs
on, and start designing the character you will spend the semester rigging.

You will also build a working rig — one with no joints in it.

The pipeline

This course follows the Pixar model. It starts in 2D, moves into 3D, and comes back to 2D.

Voice-over is recorded before animation, so animators have audio to sync to. It is the stage
that jumps its apparent place in the sequence, and it makes a larger point: a pipeline is a
dependency graph, not a straight line.

Where the rigger sits: downstream of a model you did not build, upstream of an animator you
may never meet. You cannot fix the model and you cannot supervise the animation. Everything you
control is in between.

Notice that Layout comes after rigging. The layout artist places each asset in a shot by
moving one node — the MSR node you will build in Week 3. That is the entire interface a shot
scene needs from your rig.

CPEV and MSR

See the Unit 1 Overview for the full explanation. In short:

• Every Character, Prop, Environment, and Vehicle lives in its own file and
  resolves to one top node.
• That node is called MSR — MoveScaleRotate.
• Beneath it: Geometry, Joints, Controls.

You will be checked for this on every submission from Week 3 onward.

Rig for the shot

No rig covers every situation. Characters get re-rigged for a different shot, a different engine,
or a different animator. A rig is the last step before animation, not a permanent artifact.

This is why Project 1 asks you to write a rig spec. It is the list of what your character has
to be able to do, and it becomes the rubric you are graded against in Week 16.

What exports, and what doesn't

Only joints, skin weights, and blendShapes cross into Unity or Unreal. Controls, constraints,
IK handles, driven keys, expressions, and most deformers do not.

This is worth absorbing now, because it reframes everything you build after this week. Your
control rig is not the product. It is a tool for producing good joint motion, and then it stays
behind in Maya.

Reading a concept drawing as a rigging document

A concept drawing tells you what the character is. Your job is to work out what that means the
rig has to do.

The wings have to fold — that's a driven-key joint fan. She's holding a bow two-handed — that's
a prop with its own file and a space switch. The tail is long enough to whip — that's spline IK,
maybe dynamics.

Write that list down. That is the rig spec, and the Rig Spec Checklist is
the form.

The design drawing

Your design drawing is a technical document, not an illustration.

• Views: Front, 3/4, Side, Back — plus the opposite side if your character is asymmetrical.
• Registered in Photoshop with guides at ground, ankle, knee, hip, waist, chest, shoulder,
  chin, eyeline, and top of head. Vertical center guide on front and back.
• Callouts for anything that needs explaining — how props are held, wings drawn both tucked
  and spread, detachable pieces, anything that moves independently.
• Export front, side, and back at identical pixel height. These become image planes in Maya
  in Week 3. The 3/4 view is form reference only.

If heights and widths do not match across views, your model will not match either. Getting this
right now saves real time in Week 3.

You may bring a character forward from Storyboard & Concept Development. Reusing that work is
encouraged.

Maya foundations

Rather than lecture these, we cover them by building something. Exercise 1 walks
through:

• The DAG — Maya's scene hierarchy, and how parents pass transforms to children
• Transform nodes versus shape nodes
• Pivots, and why where they sit matters
• Local space versus world space
• Rotation order and gimbal lock
• Freeze Transformations, Delete History, and why zeroed channels matter
• Custom attributes and Set Driven Key
• Locking and hiding channels
• Expressions

Naming convention

Read the Naming Convention page. It is enforced starting today and graded on
every submission.

The short version: side prefix L_ or R_ in uppercase, none for center. The suffix declares
the object's role — _bnd for joints that carry skin weights, _tip for terminal joints,
_plc or _grp for placement, _ctrl for controls.

This is not housekeeping. In Week 5 you bind your mesh to a specific list of joints, and that list
is filtered by suffix. A joint named wrong is a joint bound wrong.

This week

References

• Ultimate Ball Rig — Bloop Animation — a professional ball rig to compare against yours
• Maya Rigging Tutorial: Stretch and Squash Bouncing Ball
• Maya Tutorial: Animation Rig Ball Squash and Stretch

Next: Week 2 — Topology for Deformation