Body Language: Advanced 3D Character Rigging

Whether you're a professional Character TD or just like to create 3D characters, this detailed guide reveals the techniques you need to create sophisticated 3D character rigs that range from basic to breathtaking. Packed with step-by-step instructions and full-color illustrations, "Body Language" walks you through rigging techniques for all the body parts to help you create realistic and believable movements in every character you design. You'll learn advanced rigging concepts that involve MEL scripting and advanced deformation techniques and even how to set up a character pipeline.

Eric Allen is currently the Modeling Lead at Daz3d. Besides creating and managing the creation of the figures, he is in charge of the creation of hundreds of deformer and viseme morphs for the Daz3d figures. He also oversees the creation of the joint controlled corrective morphs. These can add up to hundreds of shapes that work with each other to produce realistic deformations. He helped create Victoria 4 (Daz3D female model found in the book) and rigged her in Maya for this title. He also built and rigged the "Runner" character which is used for most of the advanced examples. His figures are used in everything from movie content to graphic art. They have been used for the covers of 3"D User," "Popular Science" and "Scientific American" and have been used in the digital art Exotique publications. He has also worked as a freelance commercial animator where he has created medical and other types of animation using mainly Maya. He has studied Maya rigging and experimented with various techniques for years.

Kelly L. Murdock has been authoring computer books for many years now and still gets immense enjoyment from the completed work. His book credits include various 3D, graphics, multimedia, and Web titles, including seven previous editions of his book, "3ds Max Bible." Other major accomplishments include "Edgeloop Character Modeling for 3D Professionals Only" (also with Eric Allen), "Maya 6 and 7 Revealed," "LightWave 3D 8 Revealed," "Poser 6 and 7 Revealed," "3D Game Animation for Dummies," "gmax Bible," "Adobe Atmosphere Bible," "Master VISUALLY HTML and XHTML," "JavaScript Visual Blueprint," and co-authoring duties on two editions of the "Illustrator Bible" (for versions 9 and 10) and three editions of the "Adobe Creative Suite Bible."

Contributing Author Jared Fong has a profound ability for Maya rigging. He brought us Chapters 15 and 17 as well as many of the scripts included on the CD. He has been a major influence on the rigging of the projects at BYU and part of the thinking that went into this book. Jared is currently working at Pixar as a TD resident.

Contributing Author Adam Sidwell has traveled the world spreading his 3D talents. He has worked at such studios as Digital Domain, ILM, Sony Imageworks, and Weta. He has presented at Siggraph and is very proficient in the studies and methods of the "back end" of the production pipeline. Adam contributed the brilliance of Chapter 19, the "Pipeline in a Box."