These are my final thoughts on 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.
Overall the project went smoothly. From the beginning I had a very clear idea of what I was doing and how I was going to accomplish it. I have done a decent amount of rigging in the past and I was already very familiar with all of the tools that I was going to be using to make the rigs. Because of this I ran into very few problems throughout this project that could not be solved with simple trial and error or testing.
In the end, I created six distinctive rigs that all have their benefits when it comes to filming. They all have a clean hierarchy and naming conventions, clear intuitive controls, with models that look and function like a rig would in real life. Anyone who knows how to use Maya should be able to download any of the rigs I made and be able to understand and use them without even looking at the documentation I have for all of them.
The most challenging part of this project was the crane/jib rig. While all of the rigs I made have their moving pieces, the crane/jib rig had the most elements since it was a crane attached to a tripod. The most difficult part of the rig was getting the crane's main up and down rotation to work correctly using a joint based system as well as figuring out how to get the up and down movement for the tripod to animate smoothly and naturally.
To get them to work, I experimented a lot with joints, aim constraints, and set driven key. The different pieces of geometry follow the points that they are parented to, while the aim constraints make the joints rotate in the proper directions that they need to. Set driven key is an animation tool that allows an object's movement or scale to be controlled by others objects movement or controls. Using a set driven key, I was able to make sure that the movement of the geometry in the rig will always look natural because I basically animated them to make them move cleanly.
During this project I used a certain type of constraint called “aim” that did not seem to function correctly in the version of Maya I was using. Most of the rigs I made have an option where the camera's rotation can be controlled by always looking at a sphere shaped control. This is very useful if you are filming a shot and want the camera to always stay focused on a fixed point, but need to move the rig during the shot. The issue I ran into is when the aim of an object was constrained, the rotation of the object would sometimes randomly flip 180 degrees.
I had no idea what was causing this problem and after researching it to find solutions I saw that I was not the only one who had run into this issue. I tried different suggestions that I found online and experimented with the constraint, trying different settings and constraining different parts of the rig, hoping that I would find a solution. Unfortunately, I was not able to though. One thing that I did learn during the experimentation was that this problem only happened if an object was not constrained on all axises.
So to solve this problem I ended up constraining the camera’s on the rigs separately from their geometry. The camera’s for all of the rigs are constrained from all axises to avoid this flipping problem. Then, for the geometry, I only constrained the axis that the geo was supposed to be able to move on. While the geo will still randomly flip when it’s not supposed to, it does not affect the functionality of the rig.
From testing and using the rigs that I have made during this project on other projects, I learned a few things that helped me update and improve my rigs as time went on.
One of the important things I learned was how useful having an aim control can be for setting up and filming shots within Maya. It is a very quick and easy way to get the camera pointed at an exact point and can save a lot of time messing with camera rotation. It also makes it easier to create more dynamic precise shots in a shorter amount of time because it gives you full control of exactly where the camera is looking at, at all times. When I realised this,I was using my crane rig. I ended up going back to my previous rigs and gave them the option for aim controls just because I thought it was so useful. Out of the six rigs I made, I gave four of them aim controls.