Character Rigging in Maya for Game Production With Taylor Whitsett

Learn the core concepts of character rigging in Maya and how to build production-ready, animator-friendly character rigs. This 5-hour workshop by Taylor Whitsett, a Technical Animator at Respawn Entertainment, reveals how to apply basic rigging principles to create complex character rigs creatively. While character rigging can often feel overwhelming, it doesn’t need to be; Taylor shares industry-proven techniques gained through experience working on titles including Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners and Medal of Honor: Above and Beyond, to help you break through any hurdles.

Follow along as Taylor introduces fundamental rigging concepts and walks through the steps to building efficient character rigs for games. From establishing a character pipeline to setting up the bind skeleton and creating a control rig, all the way through to building automated rigging and animation systems; this workshop details the entire workflow in Maya.

The goal of this workshop is to empower you with ideas and concepts that you can apply to any character model for effective results. The Nyra character model showcased throughout the workshop was created by the incredibly talented Paul Tosca and is available as a project file with this workshop.