Adventure Club Games had the great pleasure of running several of the MSU media summer camps this year, one of which was a week long camp dedicated to 3D art and animation. The Goal of the camp was to introduce students to Maya and show them an entire character pipeline from modeling to animating. This of course brought us to the world of rigging, often frightening and confusing to the novice 3d artist. In the interest of allowing the students to move through this material at their own pace, I wrote up this comprehensive step by step guide on developing a solid rig for bipedal characters.

I pass this humble, no frills riggingTutorial on to you dear readers. No theory, no explanation of the difference between IK and FK, just a simple guide with loads of pictures to follow along with for making your first rig work. Once you start animating with your own rig, you will wonder how you ever survived trying to animate everything directly onto the bones! I hope this helps some of you, post in the comments if you have any thoughts or additions to the tutorial! If people like it, I might make some more!

Good day, and good rigging!

Andrew