Rigging Fundamentals by Jorge Vigara

If your model can’t move right, no one can animate it. This course shows you how character rigging works from the ground up in Autodesk Maya, so you end up with a clean, production-ready rig instead of a broken hierarchy.

🎯 What you’ll learn

• Place and orient joints for spine, neck, head, arms, and legs
• Align local rotation axes for predictable deformation
• Build IK and FK systems with a clean switch
• Bind geometry and paint skin weights without pinching
• Create primary, secondary, and offset animation controls
• Prep a rig that is stable and animator-friendly

✅ Requirements

• Skills: Basic understanding of 3D space and Maya navigation
• Tools: Autodesk Maya, 3-button mouse
• Hardware: 64-bit workstation capable of running Maya, minimum 16GB RAM

📝 Description

This isn’t theory for the sake of theory. You start with a static mesh and work through the exact order used in production: skeleton first, then mechanics, then skin, then controls. Each step builds on the last, so you see why bad joint orientation breaks everything later.

Jorge keeps it practical. You’ll deal with real problems like flipping elbows, twisting shoulders, and ugly deformations around hips and armpits. You’ll learn how smooth skinning and focused weight painting fix those issues without piling on extra joints you don’t need.

The last part is all about the animator. You’ll build clear NURBS controls, keep the hierarchy tidy, and add offset setups that allow for clean posing. No cluttered viewport, no mystery attributes. Just a rig that moves the way you’d expect when you grab a control.

At around 4.4 GB of video, it’s a lot of material, but it’s broken into small, repeatable steps. Perfect if you want to get into technical animation or just stop being scared of the rigging shelf in Maya.

🧑‍🎓 Who this course is for

• Beginners who want to learn rigging properly from joint to control
• Animators who want to understand what happens under their characters
• Modelers looking to make their assets animation-ready

🧑‍🏫 About the Author

Jorge Vigara is a rigging instructor with Animawarriors, a platform built by working animators to teach studio-level workflows. His focus is on clear, usable character setups that hold up in a real animation pipeline. He teaches the fundamentals the way they are used on the job – clean hierarchies, stable deformations, and controls built for speed.

🏁 Final Result

• A fully rigged biped character with IK/FK limbs, painted weights, and animator-ready controls, suitable for a rigging reel or personal animation tests.