Maya Book Rig for Stick To Manual

This is a rig I created for Stick To Manual, the short film I made with a team of about 15 people during my bachelor’s degree. Take a look!

The rig is created by a script I wrote using Python. It was a lot of fun to learn and put together. It took a lot of math nodes to make it happen. Since I was new to Maya at the time, rigging in Maya was intimidating to me. I was determined to make Maya obey me, however, so that I wouldn’t be limited by the software at any time in my career. I think I succeeded at my goal!

Additionally, all models and animations in this post were created by myself.

Here’s a demonstration of the range of motion of the book pages this rig generates.

Here is a simple animation demonstrating the nice deformations and motions the rig enables.

And here is a video I made about it. Have a look!