Josh Sobel (www.joshsobelrigs.com)
Josh Sobel is a character rigger who has worked on multiple feature and commercial projects at DreamWorks, Reel FX, Disney Animation and Blue Sky. His website (www.joshsobelrigs.com) has a lot of resources, such as free rigs, tools, and tutorials for riggers and non-rigger alike. His rigs are free and are used by a lot of students for their student projects. He has tutorials on ‘Maya Python’ scripting (which there are not a lot of) and Disney standard ‘Expressive Facial Rigging’ setup. Both tutorials are going to help me when working on my project. I can even investigate his tool, Rigging Helper, based on Python scripting which consists of more than 25 functions that help riggers speed up their workflow, as research for my project. His work in the animation field has been helpful for students needing good rigs for their animation projects and for new riggers wanting to learn more.
Jiggle Controls Generator (gumroad.com/l/jigglegenerator)
The Jiggle Controls Generator is a tool for Maya, developed through Python scripting, that is used to develop fake muscle movement, fat jiggling or skin sliding in a rig. The muscle system in Maya is fairly new and is usually very heavy on the system, that is why a lot of artists are using Maya’s Surfaces to create a fake muscle system. The muscle system is usually used in rigs to create realistic skin deformations and movements. But setting up these muscles using the Maya surface is a long and tedious process with riggers doing a lot of the things repetitively. The Jiggle Controls Generator helps to solve this problem for the rigger. It helps riggers create the muscles system using Maya surfaces very quickly so that the riggers can spend more time on what’s important, skinning. I am using this tool as a reference for my folio 1 project to learn how the tool is developed and the way the UIs are setup. And as the tool is written in Python, I can also use it to learn different functions and syntax that the developer used to develop this tool.
Autodesk Maya’s Native Export Options
Maya’s native export to a game engine option is one of the best 3D exporting to the game engine option out there. This option in Maya can be used to export 3D models, textures, rigs, and animations to either Unity or Unreal Engine. This is one of the few reliable options there right now to export from Maya to a game engine and works well most of the time. This option exports the files according to the user selection and saves an FBX file to the selected unity or unreal project. I am going to use this option as a starting point for my folio 1 project. I am going to use this as a reference, try and build a similar tool and add more functions and UI to it, to make it more user friendly and easy to use.