This rig is a part of my Maya camera rig creation project. If you want to learn more about the rigs I have made you can see the whole project here. All rigs are available to download and are free to use.
A camera rig that moves on a wheeled apparatus and prioritizes movement and precision. Great for smoothly pushing or pulling out in a shot or tracking lateral movements like walking.
For my dolly rig, there were two important things that the rig needed.
While most often dolly rigs will be put on a track like in the image below I decided that there was no need to make one in Maya since in the program you would not need a physical track in order to use the rig.
For the rig, I used these two images as references.
To create the dolly rig I first modeled it based on the images above. Then as the different parts of the model came together I started to add the physical controls and figured out how I wanted them to look and be placed visually.
When creating controls for a rig it is important for their purpose and positioning to be clear so that anyone using it for the first time should be able to quickly understand how the rig works.
This is how my final dolly rig ended up looking. It has a total of five controls.
https://www.loom.com/embed/ad75e9c599944f20a2d06adc149eb050
This control is used to translate, rotate, scale, and turn on and off the visibility of the rig. It also allows the aim control for the camera to be turned on and off and the controls visibility can be changed separately.
This is the control that will move the dolly on its wheel apparatus.