Rigging in Maya

 One of the first things the tutorial has you do is to install some useful scripts. The first of those scripts is "Select Hierarchy", which, as the name suggests, selects a joint and all of its children.

 The second script that is used early on is "Orient Joint". Once again, the name is self explanatory: it orients the joints to your desired direction.

Before (or even during) rigging, it is sometimes necessary to edit the position of the model's limbs. This can easily be done with the program's soft select feature. This had to be done for the model's leg as they were spread too far out.

Creating joints for the limbs was mostly just clicking on where the joints of a skeleton are located and moving to the next location.

The mirror symmetry feature is really helpful when it comes to limbs.

When done with the rigging process, it's important to make sure that the joints are oriented properly, especially the arms and hands. Those two should be opposite of each other to reflect how the move in nature.

 After you're done with the orientation and organizing the joints by name, it's time to duplicate the skeleton. The tutorial has you separate the skeletons in DEF and JNT. This is a process that, though it adds work at first, fixes problems and avoids more work in the future. It's easier for baking animations, easier for mocaps, allows for controls to be changed without unbinding the mesh, and is just easier for organization overall.

To constrain the two skeletons together, another script is used.

Once this is all done, it's time to make the controls for the mesh. First comes the spine and the neck, which will control the process of bending and twisting. To do this, you need to create 2D 'controls' that are constrained to the joint and have attributes to them.

Once you have created attributes, you begin the process of set key-ing them, which essentially assigns the attribute and whatever value you gave them to a feature of a joint, such as rotation.

If you want to add in some curvature, you can use math inside of a joint's node editor, such as this complicated web of processes for the neck.

Creating eye control groups is similar, with you adding in 'eyefollow' joints, parenting them to the eye controls, and then adding in offset and locator groups.

Two separate joints can be created for the arms and their controls to simulate better bending. Once again, it's a process of constraining the two joints to each other:

 and then adding attributes and values to them.

 For the hands, a more complicated process of attributes can be made, which control the opening and closing of fists.

An attribute for each finger that has them curl can be assigned as well. You just have to edit every joint (from parent to child) on each finger and then set key them to the attribute.

 Admittedly, I had some weird stuff going on here with the rotation values. It seems that my joints hadn't been oriented properly, which causes some slight issues. It's an easy fix, though.

Setting the aforementioned attributes for the fists is easy. It's the same as animation, except with more numbers and more key drivers.

When all the controllers are created for the joints, one of the last steps  before painting is to go and lock the transforms for those that only deal with rotation or movement. Scaling especially needs to be locked.

 After that you create a group of sets for the controls, for organization's sake.

Then you bind the mesh to the DEF skeleton you've created.

Then comes weight painting, which is a lot like texturing, except instead of actually adding in a color you determine which polygons are affected by which joint.

Before actually painting, the instructor recommends making a "weight dance". It's essentially an animation of the character doing their stretches in order to catch and see if there are any irregular deformations.

Oh, and a mistake was made in the tutorial. Don't forget to have all objects bound to the skeleton. This includes the eyes.

Unfortunately, sometimes the system will make a mistake. In this case, the skin around the eyes were also bound to the eye controls. There is an option in the same place where you bound the skin to unbind those polygons and joints.

Once again, painting is similar to texturing. A menu appears that lets you select the joints and the areas affected by them.

 You can either add or subtract weight to the skin. Redder/whiter means there will be more strength. Too much strength in one area could get you this:

So watch out.

Essentially this entire process is seeing if there is any abnormal stretching, and adding and subtracting weight where it's needed. It's self explanatory, really.

You can also select the vertices of one part of a mesh and switch back to painting mode in order to only focus on one area. You can also "fill" selections with the fill button. It's just like the paint bucket feature of an image editing program.

 Just watch out for accidentally selecting unwanted objects...

Even after constraining the skin to the skeleton, you can add more joints and controls. This can be achieved by simply duplicating and moving existing joints (as well as re-parenting them if necessary).

One of these can be  a face control, which goes over  expressions and blinking. he process is the exact same as past controls.

 For the eyelid joints, you just duplicate the eye joints, constrain the control to them, and paint their weights. It's that simple.

In the end, rigging is a long, tedious process. The scripts provided in the tutorial are extremely helpful and simplify some things, but the rest can only be done by hand. I personally don't enjoy it, but it's very useful to know.