Essential Skills in Character Rigging

Introduction

In 1998, I was working at redzone interactive, a third-party publisher for Sony Computer Entertainment America. We were working on NFL GameDay for the Playstation 2, which hadn’t actually been released yet. With deadlines coming up and a completely unknown landscape for the development technology, we were in a bind. We knew that the Playstation 2 could do so much more than the original Playstation, but we had no idea just how it would work or what it could do! Since I was the only person there with significant experience and time working with character animation using the new software, Maya 1.0, I was tasked with figuring out how we set up the character with all these new tools. Hence, the job of “character rigger for games” was ...