George Maestri goes back to basics.

Animation Guru George Maestri, who worked as a producer and writer on popular animated shows such as 'South Park' and 'Rocko's Modern Life' again found some time to share his insights and know-how on creating 3D graphics, working with the latest version of the Autodesk's flagship animation software Maya 2013. As a part-time instructor for the popular online video Training site Lynda.com, George created a multipart 'Essentials' series, going back to the basics and explaining everything about Maya, from getting to know the UI to creating textures and materials and exploring all the animation tools.

So far five courses of this new and up to date series have been created and uploaded at the site, so if you're ready to start learning something about 3D graphics using Maya 2013, this might be the right place for you to begin. The courses have 20 to 30 different chapters each, taking up about 1 1/2 to 2 1/2 hours per course at a regular pace, while project files are available for you to use, so you can follow along with the videos. The fifth part of his 'essentials' series (explaining everything on the 'animation tools') was just released yesterday. Make sure to keep your eye on this one, as George will be adding plenty of material soon.

Above: George covers all the polygonal modeling techniques including subdivision surfaces in the 'Maya Essentials 2' course. Below: Working with the hypershade you'll learn to add Phong and blinn materials to 3D objects to give them a lifelike appearance ('Maya Essentials 4: Creating Textures and Materials').

George Maestri Character Rigging at Lynda.

For those of you into 3D character animation using Autodesk Maya, Lynda.com has just introduced a new rigging course by George Maestri, writer and producer of numerous animated TV shows, such as 'South Park' and 'Rocko's Modern Life'.

After you've completed modeling and texturing your CG character, before you can start rendering out those awesome animations, your model has to be rigged, meaning you have to add various controls to it, enabling you to manipulate it any which way you want, which you've of course planned ahead carefully in your storyboards.

Your model maybe a character, a car or any other piece of geometry that has been specifically designed to move in a certain way, according to it's anatomic build. Maya comes with a complete set of tools, enabling you to create bones and set up a skeletal construct that can be skinned or bound to the character. Using Forward and Inverse Kinematics, you are the able to drive the rig, thus moving your character. This is, in essence, what rigging is about. Rigs can be created as simple or as complicated as needed and although you can go through each fase of the process yourself, as you create your own animations from scratch, in a professional studio environment, the rigging proces is mostly done by a professional rigger, as it's a process that can become a challenging task quickly.

A rig can also be linked to a bones system derived from motion capture data, and in fact have your digital character move in all sorts of ways, as you've previously recorded in a studio using human actors, eliminating the animation process for the large part. However, as the word 'animation' stems from the latin 'Animare' (meaning 'to breathe life into'), the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences, changed the rules of the game this year, in an attempt to keep the medium pure. Animated feature films that are created using Motion Capture data are now excluded from the Academy Award for Animated Feature Film, leaving Spielberg's 'The adventures of Tintin: The secret of the Unicorn' as the first without a nomination. So hey, if you're planning on winning an Oscar, do it 'oldschool'!

Maestri goes through the entire process of setting up a proper rig and explaing all FK and IK constraints, providing a basic model. His enthusiasm will surely get you all excited and ready to jump in there right with him to tackle some of the exercises Lynda has provided along with the video's.

Yes, Linda exists for real, she's not just a funny cartoony logo! Working with William Shatner, she was the first to use 3D computer software to previsualize a scene for a major motion picture in 1988 working on Start Trek V: The Final Frontier' (Shatner also directed). She also worked as an FX animator on 'Bill & Ted's excellent Adventure' and on Irvin Kershner's final film 'Robocop II' (Kershner also directed 'Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back' for Lucas in 1980). Together with her husband Bruce Heavin she founded the online training site Lynda.com in 1995 in Ojai, California. It currently employs more then 200 staffmembers and 140 teachers with clients such as Disney, Google, Adobe and academic clients including Yale and Princeton University and MIT.

FK/IK and Set-driven Keys.

While Foward Kinematics provides the basic movements you would expect from a naturally working construct, using various joints to complete a task or goal, it can become a tedious task as it operates in a kind of trial and error workflow. Using Inverse Kinematics, you're able to set the goal beforehand and link the character to it, making sure it moves and rotates specifically to complete the task that was set up. Although The first method creates more smoothly and rounded movements, the second proves of course extremely timesaving, both have their place and you should of course set up your rigs so they can switch between one and the other at will. The video's George provides in this course show you how everything is setup. Using some math and expressions, he also shows you how to build a custom interface and various controls to visually take charge of your character without actually having to dive into the rig itself. Maya uses MEL or Maya Embeded Language, which is based on the scripting language from Wavefront's Dynamation (one of the three earlier 3D graphics programs that continued together as Maya).

Above left: Maestri regularly contributes as a writer to 'Computer Graphics World' magazine. This month's issue features articles on Disney's 'John Carter of Mars' and Naughty Dog's popular Playstation video game 'Uncharted: Drake's Revenge'. Right: The cover to Maestri's latest book '3ds Max at a glance' published by Sybex/Wiley.

George Maestri's 'Character Rigging in Maya' consists of 60+ video's and takes up about 4 and a half hours, excluding the time you need to to follow along and get things set up right, depending on your personal level of expertise. Maestri has provided courses on Autodesk Maya since 2005. You might also want to check out some of the courses done by Eric Keller, the author of multiple prominent books on Maya. He provided several usefull courses on lighting and rendering with Mental Ray in Maya and modeling in Zbrush.

George Maestri is the man!

George Maestri was part of the original team that produced the first season of South Park. He was also one of the writers and creators of Nickelodeon's 'Rocko's modern life', which earned him a nomination for a CableACE award. He now has his own animation production house 'Rubberbug' and started sharing his experience in animation and cartooning through online video's at the Lynda.com website. In his latest course 'Creating Animated Characters' he shows how to build and set up a character for digital animation using Adobe's After Effects.

Maestri in one of the recording booths at Lynda's, teaching his skills on 3D animation using Autodesk Maya 2012.

Pixel vs. Vector.

While most cartoon animation today is created in vector based programs like Toonboom or Flash, it's After Effects that rocks the world of motion graphics and visual effects. In his latest course, out last September, George shows how to set up a character for animation in After Effects using pixel based characters in Photoshop. Yes, After Effects is pixel based and therefor able to render the stunning visual effects you've seen in all the computer enhanced action movies or even the most spectacular commercials. With the latest update since the CS5.5 suite released in April, After Effects is 64-bit exclusively and now has more features than ever to create the coolest FX.

In his latest course George shows some great tricks. Although you can import work from Illustrator that contains vector artwork (which can be enlarged indefinately because it hasn't got any pixels) you cannot adjust the shape layers as one would in Illustrator. Something that would come in pretty usefull when trying to animate curves and other shapes. In the course George shows how using a little workaround still enables you to do that.

Setting up hierarchies.

He also advices to create a reverse hierarchy when parenting all the different lower body parts of a character, which is actually a more efficient way to keep a characters feet on the ground. He shows how to use Nullobjects (empty layers) to remain in control of the whole rig. Alternatively, he gives advice on how to animate a flattened character using the puppet tool.

Tackling the problem of having a low quality mesh he has some great tips on how to handle unwanted deformation problems by upgrading the mesh density. He also explains where the secondary puppet tool options come in handy: the puppet overlap tool (to control overlapping parts) and the puppet starch tool (to create rigid body parts).

If you want to learn more about replacement animation, this is definately something you want to check out. In the course George shows you how to enable replacement animation using precomps (nested animation) by sequencing the layers and using time remap while changing the keyframe interpolation to set up a 2D rig. He also explains how to do headturns, which is pretty easy using some digital trickery and he explains how to use some basic javascript expressions to connect different parts of an animated character.

Check out more from Maestri on his site Rubberbug or read his book Digital Character Animation vol.3 which is absolutely billiant! FYI: the first season of 'Rocko's modern life' has just been released on DVD by Shout! Factory. Here's creator Joe Murray's blog update on the second volume, which is coming out soon!