Week One: Rigging Foundations and Basic Hierarchies
During Week One, students will go over some of the core foundations for rigging, Hierarchies, IK/FK switching, Naming Conventions, Constraints, Utility Nodes, and Expressions. Along with this, they will learn about the differences between utility nodes and expressions and when to use them both. During all this, there will be discussions regarding Mel and Python Scripting and how it can help in rigging.

Week Two: Spines and neck/heads
Week Two takes the students on a walk thru of riggings spines and necks. Students will learn the ins and outs of spline IKs along with other techniques for rigging spines and necks.

Week Three: Arms, hands, legs and feet
In Week Three, students are treated to a variety of approaches on how to rig both arms and legs, along with hands and feet. These will include some industry standard ideas on rigging shoulders/clavicles as well as other techiniques, on top of standard leg rigging, dogleg rigging and foot systems.

Week Four: Tentacles and tails
In Week Four, the students learn about rigging various items that use a long chain of bones, from tentacles, to tails to snakes. Each of these have similar ideas, but need to handle a variety of situations. On top of that, a brief crossroad will bring up some rigid dynamic setup to assist in creating some simple secondary motion on tails and tentacles both.

Week Five: Deformers and skinning
Week Five will begin with concepts on storing user info into outside files and how to access it, along with limited system interaction and controlling outside programs (mainly image processing systems).

Week Six: Adding physics to a character
Week Six takes students into other realms of Maya that a creature TD deals with. This week will introduce the students to the rigid dynamic system of Maya at at a more technical level than was discussed during the tails lesson.

Week Seven: Introduction to muscles and skin
Week Seven will cover some ideas on rigging muscles with 'out of the box' Maya as well as with cMuscle. Todd will discuss various techniques for simulating the appearance of muscles under the skin, where as cMuscle is a commercially available muscle system.

Week Eight: Props and mechanical rigs
In the Final Week, students get a look inside mechanical and prop rigging. Mechanical rigs will cover some vehicle rigging along with some techniques and tools for robotic arms. In Week Eight, students will go over ways of having props controls hands, and vice versa.

Level of Ability
You will need a moderate understanding of Maya to participate in the workshop. This is not a class for beginner Maya users. A little more in depth understanding of the Hypergraph is also benificial.

Hardware and Software Requirements
Maya 7.0.1 + will be used. The final week of class will deal with muscles systems, so students will need to download the demo version of cMuscle to fully participate in the final week. Students can get their 15% discount off the purchase of a full version of cMuscle by contacting the Workshops Manager. Please note, ONLY enrolled students are eligible. This discount will only be made available starting week 4 of the workshop.

A broadband connection will be needed for downloading the weekly video lessons.

Some of the sample scenes are hardware heavy, so its recommended to have a minimum of 1 GB of RAM and a fast processor.

Other Requirements
Students need to be familiar with web navigation and browsing, as well as email.

Students need to be familiar with using a bulletin board system (such as CGTalk.com) as well as how to upload attachments to postings for review.