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Asked: 2026-06-04T14:09:26+00:00

I’ve been working in a company that’s got it’s own proprietary software and I’ve

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I’ve been working in a company that’s got it’s own proprietary software and I’ve learnt rigging in that. I’ve gotten so used to rigging in that, that when I tried to go about doing some rigging in Maya, I found it was quite different. I’ve gone over quite a few tutorials online and I didn’t find them very logical in their approach and have yet to find one that’s logical and doesn’t involve an unnecessary complicated method of approaching it. I’ve got the logic of how to rig a character, but I’m struggling with implementing it in maya. Does it make sense to learn maya from scratch? or could someone direct me in a better direction to learn rigging?

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  1. Editorial Team

    Does it make sense to learn maya from scratch?

    Probably, everything you do in Maya ends up as nodes in node network. Every node network is a rig, just usually not called a rig. So everything you do in Maya is a rig of sorts, that is until you decide to wipe it off. You can’t really appreciate the system unless you start form very basic stuff, because the beauty of the system starts form there.

    So start of by making a poly cube, then open the riggers main tool hypergraph (or node editor in Maya 2012 good for small graphs). Observe that its actually already a rig consisting of 3 nodes:

    polyCube node connected to a shape and a transform node (thats the parent of the shape node just not visible in here as they resides in a separate data structure).

    All Maya rigs look something like this, just more complex. Now you can redirect any arrow to almost any nodes attribute that has a type that’s compatible. Try middle mouse dragging from transform to poly cube: You can now drive the polycubes attributes by attributes of the transform.

    Now many people do not find this intuitive, so Maya has a layer on top of this level. The menus build on this stuff without showing it to you. So you can for example do a skeleton and smooth bind to mesh without worrying about the node network. If however you truly want learn to rig in Maya then you must keep observing the node network and eventually learn to read the node reference. Because you’ll need to understand nodes and attributes once you start doing stuff like the size of this node is dependent on the position of this locator.

    Personally i find Maya confusing if i do not look in the hypergraph.

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