This is a weekly update for 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.
This week I made a snorricam rig, which is also the final rig I am making for this project. A snorricam rig is a rig that gets attached to an actor's body and is used typically to create a sense of panic or vertigo. I also did some final testing and updating to all of the camera rigs and created loom videos going over each rig.
The snorricam rig only has a couple of controls, so it did not take as long to make as some of the more complex rigs.
The only controls it has are a main control and rotate control for the camera. It has two unique controls that allow the camera’s distance from the person to be changed that are attached to the main control.
While the snorricam rig did not take too long to make I spent most of this week doing final clean up on the rigs and creating videos showing how each rig is used.
Before making the videos, I realized there was a specific situation that I had not tested with some of the rigs that I believed could possibly break them. This test had to do with switching between using different rotate controls for the camera while they were not at their default positions. I ended up being right! With a few of the rigs, if certain controls were not in their default positions and they were switched, the camera would not always rotate properly. So, I had to go back to a few of the rigs and fix this. For a couple of the rigs, I even ended up making some new controls to replace old ones to help with functionality.
The main changes I made were to the tripod rig, dolly rig, and handheld rig. I ended up replacing the arrow rotate controls for the tripod and dolly rigs with new ones, to help with functionality by combining two controls into one, which also helped with the control switching problem I was fixing.
For the handheld rig, I added a completely new control that is just for turning on and off the aim control and changing its settings. This allowed me to separate some of the controls in a cleaner way, which also helped with the switching problem and functionality.
Once all of the rigs were fixed, I finally made the loom videos for all of them. In each video I went over all of the controls on each rig, explaining what they do and how they can be used.
To see my final reflections on this project click here!