After another lesson in rigging showing us the essentials of inverse kinematic locks, I decided to read more as I found the technicalities quite hard to master so I looked back at my reference books such as Learning Maya 6: Character Rigging and Animation and Maya character animation. I also went back to rewatch the tutorial videos. I soon realised a problem; although they all promised the same end result i.e an inverse kinematic leg or a simple animated biped, almost every book or tutorial video I looked at had a different way of achieving it. Each source had a different method. For instance 'Rigging101.com' promoted the use of cube controllers and MEL commands, while most of the book and other tutorial videos didn't even mention MEL commands and I hadn't even encountered them before in Maya, let alone for this system.
Example of the confusing MEL commands on rigging101.com
This was a common problem not just for the rigging in Maya but for many of the systems, it seemed that there was 101 ways to skin a cg cat. One book would preach the ease of one system and one set of tools and another would preach an entirely different one. I found the only way around this was to try both and see which way worked best for me, it was a slow way to work as it meant trying a lot of variables but it did mean that I could find one that I was comfortable with using.
This was in effect most likely because there are a number of ways of doing the same thing in Maya, the toolbars can repeat what is on shortkeys on the keyboard etc so it’s understandable that people would find their own ways.
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