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 and Week Four: Arms, hands, legs and feet
In weeks three and four, 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 Five: Tentacles and tails
In week five, 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 Six: Deformers and skinning
Week six will cover some basic deformer setup as well as skinning techniques. On top of that, corrective bone placement will also be discussed. Topics will include skinning, lattices, clusters, wire deformers, and a few techniques on how to use them to achieve the look you want.

Week Seven: Adding physics to a character
Week seven 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 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. 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
Todd will be using Maya 2008 but students can still use Maya 7.0.1 +.

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.