I recently dug up 2 different books I owned for educating myself on content creation, both involving Maya. They are a few years old though…Im looking to learn skeletal rigging and facial animation from the ground up. Is it possible that the techniques in these books for rigging are now outdated or do you think that all the principles still hold true? Should I purchase a more up to date book for this subject?
One book is involving Maya 5 and I think the other one may be 6.0, released in liek 04…
I think you should be pretty well off in the right direction if you use those books. Of course the new version have new features which might speed things up like transfering skin weights from one side to the other. The major changes will all be in the applying of the smooth binding (Skinning) your geometry to you skeleton. You could do some Google searches after you get to that part and see diffrent techniques. About everyone who skins characters has a different way to do it anyways so you should pick up some tricks along the way.