1st Impressions: Rigging101 CD "From Zero to Hero"

[Vandal]

Thank you so much for this review.
Takes a lot of guts to say something sucks.. but hey, saves me from buying it.

Thank you again.

[stzaske]

Originally posted by Vandal
Thank you so much for this review.
Takes a lot of guts to say something sucks.. but hey, saves me from buying it.

Vandal:

I didn't say the CD sucked. What you SHOULD get from my review is that there is a reacl lack of rigging content (for Maya) on the Internet and from books. At $65.00, this tutorial is expensive, but also ends you with a good quality rig. If you want a no nonense, just step me through building a good rig type tutorial, I'd suggest you buy this CD.

I just recently purchased the AW book, "Learning Maya | Character Rigging and Animation". It has not arrived yet. It is the only other training material on rigging available. It might be a better value then the "Zero to Hero" CD. I paid $59 for the "Learning Maya | Character Rigging and Animation" book/CD including shipping. I won't know which of the two is a better value until it arrives.

-=STZ=-

[Ibanezhead]

I have the Learning Maya: Character Rigging and Animation book, and it is a great book. It goes into great detail for setting up diffent leg setups, does an OK job on the back, but leaves much to be desired for the arms. It helps you create a suitable IK arm rig with a split forearm, but doesn't cover an IK/FK combo rig. The book also covers SDK, Hand Controls, Skinning, Influence Objects, Rotoscoping, a Walk Cycle, Set Memberships, Flexors, Facial Animation, Secondary Animation for Short Hair, Gimble Lock, and a few other things like the tongue, eyes, and eyelids...

This book really opened the door for me into the world of rigging. I am very glad I got it, but you will need more info on a better back/waist setup, IK/FK arms, a head that stays upright when rotating the back, and wrists that stay oriented when moving the arms...

Vic

[jambhala]

Welcome to Spain bussines. That guys are from Spain I think (like me). The truth is that spanish bussines really sucks. Here are really good artist. But never buy something in spain from outter unless you know really where are you buying, and what are you purchasing. I was thinking to purchase that product, but dont know why, something in me told me "don't do that..." and your comments gives me the reasson. I though that was a video tutorial, such gnomon kindastuff. But... few pdf's for 60$.... pffff better luck next time.

Cheers, Carlos Reding.

[Kaiser_Sose]

Just curious, what dont you like from the Gnomon business model or practices

[onlooker]

I like to know that myself. Gnomon Material is second to none in my opinion. :buttrock:

[stzaske]

Originally posted by Kaiser_Sose
Just curious, what dont you like from the Gnomon business model or practices

I cannot discuss the content, since I've never purchased a Gnomon product. I'm speaking more as a potential customer. I've never liked how they partition their content. On Character rigging for example, I don't understand the reasoning for selling one DVD on skeletons (Kinematics I), one on arms and legs (Kinematics IV). I'd rather they sell something for beginners, something for intermediates, and something for pro's. Beginners Rigging should give everything that is needed to animate a walk cycle and a short clip. Intermediate should explain some more advanced rigs...and then the advanced DVD could go into rigging in professional workflows and in professional shops. With their current setup I'm not sure what I'm getting when I buy one VHS or one DVD, or online.

IMHO, -=STZ=-

[Kaiser_Sose]

You do have a point but he probably feels he needs the full two hours to cover one subject

Also, he could be going on the point that rigging is seperate than animating

[loked]

I must agree with stzaske. I've purchased over 15 gnomon videos and although at the time they helped me and I thought they were really cool, now that I'm a little more experienced I realize how much improvement there can be.

I dont think any of the gnomon videos really go into production techniques. They tend to be more about what the tools can do and how to use them, but not so much how you would put that stuff into use in a real production environment. If you take Jason Schleifer's DVD's and compare them with Gnomon. In Jason's DVD's you get scripts and workflows that make your pipeline a lot more efficient and intuitive. These are also scripts and workflows that you know he puts to use at Weta Digital.

For beginners that just want to learn what the tools are and how you can make use of them. Gnomon is definitely top of my list. However, for more advanced users, they are really useless in my opinion. Although most of these people like to advertise that their product caters to beginners, intermediate and advanced, thats rubbish. I personally feel its almost impossible to make one product that caters to all three unless its damn long and 1/3 of it will be pretty useless to either a beginner or an advanced user.

The other thing that must be kept in mind is the price of these thing. I live in South Africa and with the exchange rate and shipping charges, this is f$%# expensive :argh: This CD is not even video footage, its just PDF's. That's a bloody joke!! Jeff Lew is trying to make animation DVD videos with something bizarre like 2 or 4 hours of content for a very similar price or even lower and you wanna sell us PDF's. Come on now :thumbsdow

Thanks for saving me from buying this "rigging 101 CD".

later:wavey:
loked

[AlexAlvarez]

Hmmm....

Our rigging DVDs are organized into two categories... kinematics and skinning, which I think makes perfect sense. As far as how they are broken up, it really is the best way, as you should not even think about making an IK handle until you understand everything about joints, etc... they are ordered based on the order in which things get done.

As far as saying they have nothing to do with production is completely inaccurate. The kinematics and skinning DVDs focus on how I set up the Zufuhr characters, which was a real production, done for hire... And people in production have used them to get up and running with Maya. About 6 weeks ago 3 of our certificate graduates got hired at an LA game house as cinematics artists and found out that the lead character rigger learned how to rig characters from my DVDs...

Are they for 'advanced' users? nope. They are for people who are new to rigging in Maya and need to get up and running quickly and efficiently.

Do they cover 'every possible scenario'? nope. At Gnomon we have a full 10 week course on kinematics (30 hours lecture) and a full 10 week course on skinning (30 hours as well)... which therefore have more time to hit a wider range of character body types and rigs. Will we make more DVDs on character rigging in the future? perhaps.

As far as Jason's, yes, those are cool and more for experienced users, but I think it is wisest to start with ours and then move onto Jason's.

Hope this helps clarify things.

Alex

[loked]

Hey Alex,

I guess maybe I was a little harsh and based on what you are saying, your DVD's do serve their purpose. Basically what I would really like is for there to be more advanced material out there. Something on muscle systems and that type of thing. If you guys could come out with DVD's like this it would be great:thumbsup:

Sorry if I made Gnomon videos seem useless, that really was not my intention at all. They are definitely outstanding for beginners.

later:wavey:
Loked

[goosh]

Ok.. I thought I would answer some concerns, questions, etc.

First of all, I would like to thank Steve for his review and honesty.

For anybody that has tried to write a tutorial, they would know that it's not as easy as one might think.
It's very time consuming and to be able to explained in clear and comprehensive way to a wide audience is not an easy thing.

The idea behind writing this CD was because we felt there is a huge lack of rigging material out there. Lluis is a Maya instructor and I also mentor at a school and we have seen that a lot of the beginner animation suffers tremendously because of the badly constructed rig.

Both him and myself have been giving back to the community as much as we can. We have booth put free tutorials, rigs, etc so that people could enjoy an animate and concentrate on what they want.

As far as I know, IK-JOE was the first free Maya character available for people to use.

I wish I had had as much information and resources available to me what I was starting out. Most people used to be very closed with their ideas and characters and if you lacked in some areas (say modeling) if was very difficult to move into other areas. I would like to think that in some little way we have changed that since I’m starting to see more and more people giving back to the community.

Since we felt there was a lack on the rigging area, we decided to write a comprehensive tutorial that would cover everything from start to finish and that would be catered mainly for people that had a little bit of knowledge in Maya and would like to improve their skills. The idea was to catered mainly to students which we felt were the people lacking the most in this area.

The tutorial grew and grew and because of both of us being pretty busy with our full time jobs it took as a lot longer than we thought it would. Hence we decided to put a price on it. We felt that we worked too hard and too long and that this time around would be nice to get a little bit rewarded for it.

The price was something that concerned me a lot and I spent a lot of time trying to decide what would be the best. I have both Jason’s DVDs and I would recommend them to everybody because they are excellent. But I go them when I was starting out and they were a little bit overwhelming. I thought they were quite advanced for people that weren’t too comfortable with rigging, the hypergraph, etc. Also, the video part of it I felt that even though I could see Jason talking, etc, it didn’t add any value to the information that I was getting. Specially for the low quality of the video. So that was the reason for keeping the video part out. All I ended up doing was printing the documentation files and going through them. I felt that our CD gave more than half the information, at half the price, so hence we went with that.

So, to answer Steve’s concerns:

Price: like I said, this was a VERY tough decision to make, and I take into account your advice and look into in for the future. All point are taken.
Better Description: Thanks for the advice, I’ll be doing something about it very soon.
Though I wouldn’t say that the Inside Maya file is very basic. I understand that you have quite a bit of experience with Maya and have read a lot of information, so you might be familiar this information. But most people, specially people starting out, have not been exposed to this information and would helped them tremendously.
I wish somebody would have told me all these things when I was learning Maya, it would have helped me a lot to get me going.

More descriptive information: Ok, good point. Like I mentioned earlier, it’s very hard to write a tutorial that will appeal to a wide audience without overwhelming a lot of people. The idea was to try to keep things as simple as possible and in that process we might have simplified some steps too much. We know what to look out for in the future.

Better Character Choice: I would have to disagree with you there. Any good modeler would tell you that the standard Da Vinci pose is actually not a good pose. You have no points of reference and most characters end up with arms too long or too short. Also by modeling the character in a relax pose you make sure that your deformation will be the best when the character is in the pose that he’ll be for most of the time (and that’s at a 45 or relax pose) The shoulders and armpits will be a lot better deformed this way. That does mean that it’ll be a little bit more difficult to position the bones, but once done, your deformation will look a lot better.

More comprehensive: Like I said, we wanted to keep things as simple as possible without overwhelming a lot of people. IK/FK switching is nice, but I think a lot of beginner people would get confused with all the set up. Besides, we do offer it for free in our site.

There are a few other things that Steve doesn’t mentioned and those are the Scripts which I think form a pretty big part of the package. MelScripting is something that most people shy away from and if you have some good scripts it’ll make a huge difference in the time you spend rigging or animating, etc. My rigging time has been cut to a third because of the scripts that we have included in the CD.

Well, I hope that helps clarify a few points. It was our first try at this and as you might imagine we had a lot of concerns, and worries that the only way to find out about them was to put it out there and see how everybody reacted to them. Now we have a much better understanding of what people want and what you are after and if we decide to make another one I’m sure consider all these points

Thanks to everybody

Do keep checking back since I’ll be putting some more new free stuff slowly as my time allows me to do so

Goosh

[goosh]

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