Making better animation controls doesn’t always mean making more complicated representative shapes that can be selected. Brent Forrest suggests that better animation controls is actually doing more, with less shapes.

how to get more functionality out of fewer shapes on screen

In his new “Get to the Point” tutorial, Brent puts that premise into practice. Brent shows us how to create better animation controls in Maya, and how to get more functionality out of fewer shapes in the rig and not eh screen.

There are some great parenting tips in this tutorial, covering the short MEL commands of “parent -add;”,  “parent -r -s;”,  and “parent -add -s;”. By using the shape parent MEL commands you can get a much cleaner result for your animation controls, while the “parent – add;” will give you some interesting instancing options.

Brent also covers how to share channels between multiple objects. This can be practical for setting something like an FK/IK switch that will be present no matter which is enabled.