Intro to Rigging

This was my first day learning how to rig in Maya2025. Although I have prior experience with the program and feel comfortable using it as my main modeling tool, I was starting completely anew with zero prior knowledge about rigging and animation. Due to this, I was looking for a tutorial that even a complete beginner can follow through. Among many considerable options, I chose this specific tutorial from Academic Phoenix on YouTube to follow through.

What I learned from this video can be divided into four big steps-

1. Setting the joints & binding the mesh

2. Creating controllers

3. Constraining

4. Animating

and follow this order as I explain each thing I have learned from each step.

1. Setting the joints & binding the mesh

- Create a long cylinder. After adding some subdivisions(meshes need enough polygons to be deformed accordingly!), delete history(including non-deformer history) & freeze transformation.

* delete history: 'Edit'->'Delete all by type'->'History'. do it again for non-deformer history

- Change mode to 'Rigging' to see 'Skeleton' on the top menu. Click 'Create Joints' to start making joints

* go to the tool option, then 'Bone Radius Settings' to change 'Long Bone Radius' to 0.5 or any amount same as the short bone radius to prevent from joint sizes fluctuating by distance

* When setting joints, it's best to work on an orthographic view- if not, it might be placed in random depths

* make sure to place the joints 'inside' the mesh

* press 'X-ray Joints' to see the joints through a mesh

- You can see in the Outliner that each joint is 'parented'. This means, that the 'child' will be affected as well when the 'parent' is.

* You can individually move each joint without affecting its child or parent by pressing 'D' while moving

* You can change the name of the joints at once- by selecting the components you want to change and then using 'Search and Replace Names' under 'Modify'

- Select the mesh and joints together(either using the main screen or outliner), then go to 'Skin' -> 'Bind Skin'

- If the joints show color like this, it means that it worked properly!

* each joints have its orientation and rotation angle, which is important data. You can see that the x-axis (red line) is always pointing towards the following joint. If this gets distorted somehow, go to 'Skeleton' -> 'Orient Joints'

2. Creating controllers

- Create a NURBS circle at the 'base' of the cylinder, then snap the center onto the joint close to it

- Create consecutive circles, smaller ones, on each other joints(also snapping onto the joint)

* Use 'Snap to Points (shortcut: v)' to perfectly snap onto the center of the joint

- Change name of circles(optional), then parent in order

* there are two ways of parenting one component to another- either 1- drag the 'child' to the 'parent' in the outliner while pressing the middle mouse button, or 2- click the 'child' then 'parent', and press 'P' while selected

3. Constraining

* The reason for this is to protect the joint and guide the animators to use the controllers instead of the joint itself!

- Select each control and joint(one at a time, order matters), go to 'Constrain' -> 'Parent'

* This is not the same as the parenting that we did for the controllers and joints

- Repeat this process for each joint and controller

This is how it looks when its done- controllers all connected to each joint, and joints moving properly only by selecting the controller

(Not essential, but is a nice practice)

- Group the joints and the constraints(ctrl+G), press 'Create New Layer and Assign Selected Objects'

- Turn off the Visibility of the layer with joints and constraints

This is how it looks like after hiding the joints and constraints- the controller and the mesh is the only thing left visible

- Select joints and constraints, select all the attributes in the 'Channel' box, right click 'Lock and Hide Selected'

- Select each controller, select attributes Scale 'X', 'Y', 'Z' and 'Visibility', right click 'Lock and Hide Selected'

The rig is all set!

4. Animating

* Overlapping Animation

- Select all other controls except the one at the base. Go to Timeline, Click frame 1, and Press S to keyframe.

Repeat this with Frame 50 and 25(or any other frames that you wish to animate, but the other one in the middle of the two)

- In this tutorial, they are animating a tail swishing left and right. Thus, after animating the tail on frames 1 and 25, copy the movement of frame 1 onto frame 50 by dragging frame 1 onto 50 with the middle mouse button, then press 'S'

* you can cut the animation playback to certain frames by putting a number here, zoom in&out with this bar

- To create overlapping animation, select all the joints but exclude one following one(ex: tail 3-6), double click on the Timeline to highlight the animated frame range in blue(maya2025. in Maya2019, which is the version Academic Phoenix is using, seems to be highlighted in red), and then drag 2-3 frames to the right with the middle button

- repeat until the last joint animation is delayed

- you can 'shorten' the entire animation by selecting all joints, double-clicking the Timeline, dragging either one of the left or right buttons, right-clicking the button, and press 'snap

Final Result