Why am I creating an auto-rig?
Because I am transitioning my career from a software developer to a technical artist and I need smooth transition to enter into the animation and games industry. I started rigging in March 2020 and since then, I have enjoyed it mostly because there is a technical part and problem solving in this but also because my past experience is supporting me. I spent my summer 2020 self-learning rigging and got introduced to procedural rigging in Maya using Python. I was unable to finish that tutorial from pluralsight so I wanted to spend a semester working on it. Also I knew that this is an evergrowing tool, so I wanted to learn the basics of it, starting with Maya-Python relationship. I got my basic concepts clear in Fall 2020 related to rigging when I took a course in CMU- Rigging for Production. It was an amazing course and I told my instructor that I want to work on auto-rig and he supported me and we planned to do this project and he became my advisor.
For the first week, I explored the people, in linkedIn, who have already created an autorig. I found some, such as Eyad Hussein (Ice), Fernanda Coelho, Roman Jeffery (Colossus), Raf Anzovin (The setup machine), Rafael Fragapane (Cult of Rig), Noah Alzayer. I got to talk to Fernanda and Roman which was very helpful and eye opening in a way that showed me the time, effort and patience required to create an autorig. I was overwhelmed to talk to these people and I was suggested to work on a part of a body, say an arm, in this semester.
I think I am still planning to create the autorig for the whole body (except the face), hoping to figure things out on the way, but with less features, not as many features as Ice or Colossus. As resources, I will be following the pluralsight tutorial on procedural rigging which will get me started, then I will go through Mark Schipper's youtube tutorial on Maya-Python, parallely reading the book- Practical Maya Programming with Python by Robert Galanakis.
I did started the procedural rigging tutorial and still setting up my python, maya, environment variables, python path, IDE (Visual Studio Code), etc. Also, I started the book as well but I have to have all the previous mentioned setups ready, which is not ready as of today, to proceed with the chapters which are programming heavy, focused on PyMel.
Along the way, I wish to learn from Chris Zurbrigg about PyQt and Pyside2, and also check the website antcgi.com .
Will keep you posted with my progress in this 14 week ride.
Stay warm!
Namrakant
