I watched “Introduction to Rigging in Maya 2017” by Eric Kunzendorf on Pluralsight (tutorial link).
The most useful tool by far that I learned about was using MEL scripts, mentioned several times throughout. One of the more useful ones that I’m keeping are the scripts mentioned in comet scripts, which add scripts for selecting hierarchies and orienting joints. A later video also included a script for making control curves, which while rather simple, is still something I found useful.
Something that I ultimately didn’t use, but think I will make use of in the future if I end up doing more complicated rigs, is the use of separate skeletons — a deformation skeleton and a joint skeleton — as mentioned in section 3, starting with skeletons.
The most important thing I learned from the tutorial was in section four about the legs, feet, and shoulders, which was setting up inverse kinematics and setting up controls, like in IK.
