Character Rigging for Beginners in Maya

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Kelly, and I would like to welcome you to character rigging for beginners in Maya. I am Betamax to Taotie program B to heal the sick and injured. And ice cream. Yeah, sure everyone of us has more certainly enjoyed watching these awesome movies. But have you ever wondered how these are being created? I think most of you did and even wanted to learn how to create like this. The answer is very simple. Yes. Reading, you can do that. It's all start with the rigging, and it is really rigging that will allow you to bring life to the 3D characteristic like the one you just saw, these 3D movies. So in this course, we will start from scratch by covering all the basics of getting started with 3D rigging tools. In Maya, we will learn how to create joints and work with inverse kinematics. We will discover how to form our character is moving scanning. Scanning is very important in rigging, so we will spend a good amount of time to learn that and learn all the tools that you will need to improve your character's skin and deformations. We will learn how constraint's work and how to use them to set up animation controls by building a project together from start to finish, you will be provided with valuable knowledge and you will be presented with every tool and skill that will be essential to your radian in Europe flow, the best part. By the end of this course, you can immediately start applying all the techniques you will learn in different ways to your own work. I don't know about you, but I'm so excited to start rigging characters in my app, and I hope you too. So let's get right to it. 2. 01 What's Rigging: Okay, so what's rigging? You may have come across this server for thrown a lot in the animation industry. What's, don't know exactly. What does it mean? Even though the term may seem a bit overwhelming, especially for those who encounter it for the first time. It simply means is setting up controls to drive a specific model or mesh. Okay? It can get quite complex, no doubt, but that's just the the basic definition of what rigging is. Now, would you want to break anything? Well, rigging makes it a lot easier for us to animate objects and animate our characters. It will be impossible to do character animation without rigging because you would need some source of control system to set up. Because you will need some source of control setup to animate a character with or any made the objects. I think the easiest way to think about it is what it looks like without a reg, just as cultural sliding through the space. So what's a rigging artists do is actually add bones. You put then this skin on top of it. And he add controls for animators to use so dad, they can crack the performance you see on screen. He is also responsible for setting up facial rigging out. What does this smile looks like, and so on. So now that you understand what rigging is and why it is so essential. And let's say we go ahead and we'll watch it it next lesson. 3. 02 Getting familiar with maya's interface: In this tutorial, I will introduce you to the Maya interface. So if this is the first time that you open Maya than shear not it might seem a little bit intimidating at first glance. However, I will go ahead and now guide you to the most important parts of Maya will be working with the most. So Maya actually have done a pretty good job in organizing the tools and options into separate categories so that it can simplify the way you work inside Maya and improve your performance. Okay, so let's say, for example, that you want to use Maya just for modelling. So my r gives you this drop-down menu here that you can go ahead and switch to many different options. The modelling is the first one. And so when you choose modelling, Maya, we'll go ahead and change this toolbar or menu bar here to flex the modeling options. Let me go ahead and change that, for example, to the rigging option. And as you can see here, it has changed to reflect and to give you the options necessary and dedicated for the rigging workflow. However, some these items here are going to be common across all of the menus. For example, the Windows display, Modify, select, create, edit, and file are common across all the menus here. And so what changes is just these ones here. So for example, if you want the animation option, you're going to get the animation tools and options dedicated for that. Also, maya have gone ahead and organize these menus or these options and tools. Here as well. You can see we have the curved surface. So this is shelf dedicated for the curves and surface. You will find here all the 2D and 3D NURBS, surfaces, lines and shapes. If you want the polygons, you can go ahead and switch to this one here. If you want the sculpting tools, you can find that here as well. If you want. The rigging tools. Here are there also the animation rendering, facts and the X Gen here, if you want to add hair to your characters and so much more. So Maya have done a pretty good job at organizing the tools into shelfs dedicated for every workflow that you do inside Maya arise great. Here at the left, you will find some tools here. This is the toolbar. We have the Select tool here to select an object like me, for example, go ahead and first switch the polygons shelf here and click on the polygon cube, and this will create a polygon. We also have the option to go to the create. And from here we can also select the polygon primitives and also check or select the cube. And Maya, we'll go ahead and create a cube at the origin of the space for us. So the Select tool here. By using the Select tool, you can select an object. Let me go ahead and add another sphere here and move that here to the side. The way we move objects inside Maya is by using this icon here. This is the Move tool, or you can press the W key. When you have an object selected, you can press the W key and you will get this gizmo here or this move manipulator that you can use to start moving your objects around in Maya. Okay? You have also the rotate. So if you press the E key or if you click on this icon here, again, this different gizmo, this is the rotation gizmo, which you can use to star, rotating your objects around. And also you can use the archae, the archaea, we'll let you use the scale tool. This is the scale icon tool. And by using that, you can start scaling and resizing your objects however you'd like. Okay, so these are the most important tools that you will be working with the most. In Maya, we have the Move Tool, the rotate tool, and the scale. Okay? So if you want to just select your objects without using any transformation tool, you can hit the Q key or use this Select tool here, and you will able to select your object. This is the Lasso tool. This will give you the option to draw a lasso around your objects and to select that. This will be very handy in case where we have certain vertices that you want to select. For example, let me go ahead and show you. Now this is the object mode of an object. If you want to go ahead and Start adjusting an editing the components of your object. You can either hit the F8 on your keyboard or mouse click. And here you can select the options or the components that you want. Let's say for example, we want to grab the vertices of this object here. And if I now select a vertex, and if we use the move tool, we can start moving this around and editing our mesh however we want. Okay? And by now using this lasso tool here, we can draw a lasso and select just these points here. So you can see that the lasso tool be very handy in certain situations where we want to grab certain vertices in a certain places, for example. And we also have this paint select tool. This is a great options which give you a brush that you can use to start painting. And once you start painting, you are now also selecting by painting. Okay, so I hope you get the idea. So when you start painting these objects or these vertices, you are in fact selecting those, okay, by painting. And so you get this brush here to select your objects components. If you want to adjust the radius of this brush, you can hit the B key, hold down the geeky and left mouse button. And you can see we are now able to resize radius of our brush. We are now able to grab a more range of vertices. All right, super cool. If you want to get out of the component mode and go back to the object mode, you can either hit again the F8 or right mouse button and choose the object mode. Okay, great. The icons we have here, these, these are the layout options. So for example, this is one window here, this is the one selected. If we now select the next one, you can see that Maya will give us this four panels layout. We have here the top view. We have the front view here, and here we have the side view. So these are different views of the objects you have here in your scene. Okay? If you want to go back to the just one panel, you can go ahead and use this icon here. You can also go ahead and use a shortcut for that, which is the Space bar and left mouse button. So hold the space bar and then you can choose here whichever window or view you want. For example, we can switch to the front view. You can see now we are in the front view or it can go to the top view, for example, this is the top view, or you can hold the Spacebar and left mouse button. And let's go back to the perspective view. Super cool. This here is called the grade. This is the grid in Maya which she can use to draw or position precisely objects on. You can go ahead and toggle this on and off by using this icon here. This is the grid visibility icon. Okay, so you'll have that option as well. And now here, at the right side here we have the channel box. So the channel box is very important in Maya. Will, it will give you any nodes linked to your object. For example, when we have created the sphere here, my, I have gone ahead and give us this poly sphere node. This is the node use by Maya. And you can use this also to adjust the objects that you create initially. For example, we can change this radius parameter here by middle mouse and dragging. You can use the control when middle mouse dragging to adjust the values slowly, Okay. And we have the subdivision X she can use to readjust the subdivisions grass, the height and width. You can see now we are able to modify the shear here. So the channel box, as you can see, is very important. It lists every node objects that maya uses to construct objects. However, the most important note here is going to be this transformation node. In fact, this will give you the possibility to transform your objects. So if you remember, when we start moving our objects around, take a look at these fields here or these channel. So these reflect the position and any transformations we do on our objects. So if you rotate, if we scale, you can see that these are reflected here on the right side. And so this is very important here to see because. I will now show you that you can use this here to start animating, for example. So this here less the information and transformation of your objects and you can use this as well to animate. So now we are going to go to the Animation phase. Congratulations, This is going to be the first animation that you do to be able to animate your objects inside Maya. You can go ahead and either set key frames. So let me show you how to do that. For example, let's say that you want to set keyframes on the Translate fields here. So the way to do that is by hitting the shift W and Maya. We'll go ahead and set keyframes on the Translate channels. You can see those turned red, which means that these are keyframes. And keyframes are what allow Maya to save or to interpolate between two positions. So if we, for example, now go ahead and slide with the left mouse button here on this time line. This is where we put keyframes. If we now slide to the frame 10 here. In fact, you can zoom in or out on the time range here too. See more frames or less. Let's, for example, zoom in a bit. So something like this. We are now on frame 10. However, let me show you this icon here. This is the auto key-frame toggle. If you have this on and start now moving this sphere here, maya will go ahead and set the other keyframes automatically. You can see this frame here. We have a red tick here indicating that they are a keyframe here. Now if we start sliding with the left mouse button, Here's your first animation. Congratulations. So this is how animation basically works as an interpolation between two keyframes. And Maya do the hard work automatically. It says in-between key-frames, between the two main keyframes that you said and Maya, we'll go ahead and interpolates between those to give you this animation here. So we can slide now to the frame 16. And for example, take this here. We can start now playing around. So something like this. And as you can see now, this is how animation basically works. Hurry some stuff. Okay, So this is how animation works. If you want to set rotation keyframes, you can hit the Shift E, and this will give you a rotation. Keyframes, you can start now if you start rotating your objects, Maya will save these position or these rotation keyframes now, and as you can see now we're able to rotate or animate the rotation. And the same thing goes for the scale. If we had the shifts are and move and start scaling our objects down, my will remember that. And as you can see, this is how animation works. Super cool. So that's all there is to it for animation in Maya. The area here is going to show you operations done by Maya and any errors will be shown here as well. And here on the left, this area here is the mail command line. This is where we can put male. This is a programming tool actually that you can use the ML language. This is the Maya Embedded Language. This is a language used by Maya to start programming and coding certain functions. Here in Maya, this is a little bit more advanced. And as you get more familiar with Maya, you will get to understand and start using MEL commands. Okay, so another thing I wanted to show you, and that is this show here. This is a pretty tricky one actually, because in some mini cases where you actually go ahead and create, let me show you, for example, let me turn off the polygons. You can see that the polygon objects have disappeared. They are not actually disappeared. They are just a hidden, this is a show menu. And if you are not careful, you may go ahead and start adding some objects. You can see we are adding polygon objects. However, these are not visible. But if we start to add, for example, some NURBS surfaces, these are in fact other type of 3D objects, okay? These are visible, but why? Because simply the polygons is turned off and there are hidden. If we now go ahead and bring them back by clicking or checking the polygons, you can see the new objects we have added. They are visible. And if we just want to hide now this NURBS sphere, we can do just that from here we can uncheck NURBS surface. And here you can see that there's has been hidden. Okay? So you have to be very careful here. So always make sure the objects that you create are visible. Okay? So that's going to be pretty much it for this quick introduction to Maya's interface. As you can see, Maya is a pretty awesome software. It is very rich and you can do anything you want with Maya, you can model it, can create some VFX, you can read, you can animate, you can do pretty much anything. And so you have to first spend a little bit of time to get yourself more familiar with the tools and the panels and also the menus. And once you start getting more familiar, you can then go ahead and move on to more advanced topics. Also, I wanted to show you a, something here. It's very important. I think I forgot to do that, but now I will go ahead and show you, and that is how to navigate inside the 3D view port. So to be able to rotate around the 3D Viewport, you can hold down the ALT and the left mouse button. So the Alt and left mouse button will allow you to rotate the camera around your objects in your scene. If you want to zoom in and out, you can hold again the ALT key and the right mouse button. This time. You are now able to zoom in and out on your objects. And the old and the middle mouse button will allow you to pan around the 3D viewport. So these are the three most important shortcuts. Remember to start navigating around your 3D scene. Again, the OS and left mouse button will allow you to rotate around your objects in your 3D viewport. The OT and the right mouse button will allow you to zoom in and out. And the OT and the middle mouse button will allow you to Penn your camera around the viewport. All right, Super Core. Sometimes when you start working on objects and guess and you get four away from your object, you can just hit the F key. And Maya, we'll go ahead and frame the or focus the 3D view around that objects. If we now select the cylinder and hit the F key, Maya, we'll go ahead and focus around this cylinder. Alright, so that's pretty much it for this tutorial. 4. 03 Preparing your Model for Rigging: So before we get started reading this character and bringing him to life, it will be a good idea to spend a little bit more time to check and see if this character here is properly modeled and ready to be used in the rigging process. By the way, I think you all know this character. It's one of our favorites superheroes. It's called Mega Man. We all once played with him in a number of games and watch many animation series of him. And so I felt it will be a great character to use here as an example and to show you the potential and what you can do once you start learning all the techniques we'll be discussing throughout this course. And to bring an awesome character like this, of course, to life. I want to let you know that you can find this modal here on the website k1 add.com. I was navigating right there and found this very good model. You can go there also and find many free 3D models that you can use in this course. Or you may use your own models if you have already those on your disposal. I will include this model here in the project files folder attached with this course so you can access it and start using it easily. All right, so the first thing you might need to check when preparing a model for Reagan is its topology. By topology, we mean how the model is constructed. In other words, the flow of edges and vertices that construct a model. To be able to see this topology and the wireframe of your model. You can go here to this button and click on the wireframe on shaded. This will enable you to see that if it's already disabled, just go to this place here and click on this button here, wireframe on shaded. Or you can go to the shading menu here and enable the wireframe on shaded. This is now enabled. So we are able now to see the faces and the topology of our model. When we have a model that is prolly created, chances are we can get some weird and bad artifacts when rigging. What I mean by that is, whenever you are animating, make sure you're always working with four sides polygons, okay? Not three sides polygons. Just four sides polygons like the one we have here, okay? Four sides polygons are going to be much better in deformations and go into give you much better flexibility and much better deformations. Then the triangle shapes here, the triangle shapes cause some artifacts when animating, and that can give you some unwanted results and can be seen a little bit ugly in some cases when animating. However, in some instances, it's almost impossible to have just a model completely constructed with quotes. In this case, just try to hide these triangles here in places where they are not going to be much deformations, such as the, for example, this helmet here, this is a solid objects, it is a hard surface objects. And so this is not going to be the forming as much. So here we're going to be fine if you work with triangles. However, in places such as these, for example, the body, if our character is going to be flexible and it is going to be deformed quite often. So you better go ahead and try to hide these triangles as much as you can in places where they're not going to be much deformations, okay? And if cases, you want to go ahead and start adjusting and editing your model, you can select a mesh and right-click choose either the edge. For example, let's say that this, you want to delete this edge here. Just go ahead and select it and hit the Control Delete. And this will delete that edge. You can also right-click on your mouse, select a face and start working with that if you want to, you can also right-click, choose a vertex to choose the points and start working with those however you would like. Okay, so this is how you can access the components of your mesh and start adjusting that however you'd like. So the next thing that I would like to talk about is freezing the transformations of your model and your objects in general. Let's say, for example, that this is, this is the position of a model. And you can see here in the channel box we have some values here, okay? You always want to make sure that you freeze the transforms of your mesh. Or in other words, to clean up the messy values that you get here. That way, you can have a really clean mesh to start with and you can avoid any issues. That you may come across later on when scanning. The way to do that is select your mesh, go to the Modify and choose this freeze transformations. Then you can see now we have a clean mesh. If we move this all the way here and one or two, bring it back to the default position. All we can do is go ahead, highlight the Translate channels and 0 them out. And voila, you can see in our, this is then you're starting points. Or in other words, this is the position that the model is going to be started from. So this is the new position or this is the new origin of the object. This is the new starting points. And this is how to freeze the transformations. You select all objects, go to the Modify, choose freeze transformations. All right, so super cool. Another thing that I would like to talk about is also cleaning up the mesh by the leading, any construct nodes here. Whenever you start working with objects that are going to be here, a lot of no's that is going to be added by Maya. And the way to clean them up is by selecting the mesh and go over to the Edit menu here, and go all the way down to delete, all by type, delete history. This way, you get a clean mesh to work with. And you can start working with your meshes without any issues just to make sure to avoid any issues that can arise later on when scanning or applying any constraints and controls so your rig setup. The next thing I would like to talk about is having these objects here stored in a separate layer. While to do that, well, let's say, for example, that you are trying to create a skeleton. However, at some point you may need to turn the visibility of this mesh here of to be able to see just the skeleton. So display layers here are going to be very convenient in that case. So the way to use that, I have gone ahead and stored all these objects here in a layer. And so now if I click on the V here, you can see that, yes, now we're able to hide our model much more easily. And now if you have any joints in your scene, you can see those very easily and start working with those very conveniently. If you want to bring your model back in, just had this area here, and the view will show up telling you that the model is now visible in the C. Okay, so just select every object here. If you want to, you can create a new layer, or if you want to create a new layer with a selected object, you can click on this icon here, and this will create a new layer and add that selected objects, that layer, if we now hit the V, You can see that just mega means helmet is being hidden. Alright, so this is how you can do it. Another thing I would like to talk about is this T-pose here. This pose is called the T posts. I think if you have ever been in the world of animation or Reagan in general, you may come across certain models that come with this pose here. This pose here is a neutral pose. And whenever rigging your models, you want to make sure that you read them in a neutral pose like this one here. You may come across some certain models that have their arms a little bit bent inward, something like this. Those are all fine. Okay. This one and the other ones are all fine. However, you always have to make sure to work with a neutral position like this one, just to make sure you get better deformations when Reagan and when animating. All right, so that's all the considerations then I want to talk about before we move on and start creating our character skeleton. So just go ahead now and use everything we have learned and talked about in this course to make sure your model is ready to start using for rigging. I will go ahead and stop the lesson here now. And in the next lesson, Let's get started with creating the leg joints for our character. 5. 04 building leg joints: All right then, so in this video, I will show you how to start rigging this character by creating some leg joints. Okay, so the first thing we need to do before we get started is to always make sure that you have everything visible in the sea. And so to do so, we can go over to the show menu here and make sure that all these options are checked. This way, you can guarantee that every object you create, in every objects you add will be visible in the scene. Actually, you don't want to learn this the hard way because how many times you have actually created some objects and you cannot see those objects because you accidentally mess or uncheck some options here. Okay, So for example, I'll go to the show menu and uncheck polygons. This will hide the polygon objects. If I uncheck the, for example, the pivots or George option, which we will use this tutorial, then it will hide every joint object. So let's bring back the polygons by hearing the polygons object. Okay. What we can do now to create the leg chain or the leg bone objects is the first. Go to the modeling menu here and switch over to the rigging menu. This will show us the options dedicated for the rigging and scanning. Okay. Now let's talk a little bit about the rigging process and the skeleton that will control our objects are our 3D model here, you can think of a skeleton as the normal skeleton of a human p. So we have bone objects that help us move and rotate our arm, for example, our knee or foot, and every places in our body. So the same thing applies here in the 3D packages. We will create joint objects which will behave as bones. And we will place them in places where the model will move and rotate. For example, in this video, we will create the thigh bone and the knee bone that will control the sections here. So the joints, objects in Maya will do just that. It will simulate the exact same behavior in the real bone objects of a real human, right? We can do this right here from the perspective view. However, it is not going to be a good idea. Because let me show you what can happen. So if we go to the skeleton option here and select Create Joints In turn on the X-ray Joints option here, this option will help us see the joints through the 3D model. So for example, you can see I have created a joint objects. There is an articulation pivot from which this area is going to rotate from. But if we start or continue to create, it looks nice from here from this angle view. But once I hit the Enter key and I rotate around the 3D view, this little box. Not very good, not as expected. Okay. So we didn't want this results. And so this actually what happened if you create the joints objects in perspective view, it cannot predict where those objects are going to be created. Okay, let us select the root joint and hit the Delete key. But before we do so, let's talk a little bit about these choice objects. You can see that every joint objects is links to the other in a hierarchical format. So we have the very bottom child objects, which is linked to the upper bone objects or joints objects. And to illustrate that these two objects are linked together, Maya will draw over this bone objects here to show you that these two objects are linked together. And so this is going to be the root objects. If we rotate that, the entire hierarchy will follow. The same goes here. This will drive the child objects with it as well. Okay, So these, as I've told you, this, will simulate the behavior of a real human bone objects. Let us delete, let us hit the delete e. And now what we will do is actually switch over to another view which will help us create and place those joints, objects more precisely where we want them to be. Okay, so let's hit the Spacebar and switch over to the left or the right view. I will switch to the right view here. All right? Or you can go to the icons right here and select either the perspective or the four view layers. Or you can just go over to the perspective and hit the space bar, click the View. All right. Now what we can do is go over to the wireframe and shaded icon and click on it. Or you can go to the shading and choose wireframe on shaded. Well this will be the same. Also, let's make sure that the X-ray joints is active. You can do this from here as well. And now, let's go ahead and grab the Create Joints option from the skeleton menu. Make sure you are under rigging menus. And so let's go to the Skeleton, create joints. And now what we can do is start placing the joint where we want them to be. So click and hold. And that will show you where the joints are, objects is going to be created. So we will use, we will place it right here. For example, this is, this will be a good point for the Thai to rotate from. Next is going to be the knee joint. We will place it, for example, right here. And next, we will place the ankle joint right here. And when you finish creating your joints to end the creation process, just hit the Enter key. Alright, That's really good. Now let's switch over to the perspective view and see where those objects are created. You can see they have been created in the center. Now you can use the move tool to grab it and make sure to move it so it fits nicely within the leg of our 3D model. Okay, Let's move it just and a little bit here to the right. Okay. Now to rotate it, you have the option to go ahead and rotate directly from these options are these fields, the rotate field using the rotate tool. But this is not a good idea. Why? And we have mentioned this previously in a video. We won't these transform values to be as clean as possible. So there is another typical way to do it. And that's why switching over from the channel box to the attribute editors by hearing the control a. That will brings us this joint option. And under the joints section here you have these joints oriented option and D is what we will be using to adjust and rotate or orient our joint objects with doubt influencing the real values here. And so by doing so and by keeping these fields clean, we can ensure that later on we can read our animation and the values here much more accurately and we can bake animation much more accurately and precisely without any issues, right? And so now in the, under the joint section, you can play around with these values here, you can hold the Control key and start orienting middle mouse and drag by holding the Control key. And that will adjust the orientation of your own objects like so. And so I think a good value, it will be minus reto in the field of the root of the thigh. So this is the seems a good value. I can switch over to the front view by hitting the space bar and choosing front view to see clearly where this chain routes or this chain object is being placed. And so it looks great. It fits really nicely within the 3D model. All right, let's switch back to the perspective view. Hit the Control a to switch back to the channel box. And one thing I would like to mention is why we have created this joint hierarchy in this predefined angle. This is called the preferred angle, and this will help us later to define and set the angle from which the IK handle will use to control much more precisely the behavior of the IK chain. And so this seems a little bit complicated right now, but later on we will see why we have created this chain objects in this angle. Here. You have another option is to create leg or the foot bone in one go. We have just created the thigh and the knee joint. And you can also sell continue creating the third bones in one go. But this will kind of limit the way you control an object. As a simple model like this, it can still work as a beginner. It is a kind of good approach to create this entire chain as in one go. But it will kind of limit the way you will control your model. And so this is why I have separated the leg joints separately from the bone, which we'll be creating in the next lesson. So in the last lesson we will create the foot bones and link them together to the leg joints to give us more flexibility to this awesome character and make it more flexible to use an enemies. 6. 05 Local vs World Orientation of Joints: Local orientation versus the world orientation of joint object is going to be a very important topic to understand as a rigor in this point here, when you are learning about 3D rigging. And this can influence the way you set up your rigs. So by understanding this topic, you can be a good rigor and you can more efficiently rake your characters and give them appropriate and more efficient controls. So for example, if I select this point objects here, and if we press the W key to grab the move tool, you can see that now this pointer or this pivot handle is pointing down the chain. And this tells you that this now is the object orientation of this root joint. If you switch over to the Wold orientation by pressing and holding the W key and the left mouse button and choosing the world, you can now see that the pivot handle will change and reflect the true or the orientation of the world objects here you can see that both are matching. Now if you move the joint object, you can move it in the world coordinates. But if you switch to the object mode, you can now move it locally. You can see that the pivot has changed to reflect the local orientation of that bone objects. And so this will be very important when we set up our XOR regs, for example. Now we can see that we are getting the true orientation of the bones. But here you can see, you can notice that these are quite different. When you are starting out rigging. This might not important aspects when you are just starting out, but when you are developing your skills as a character rigger, you want to make sure that the orientation of the entire chain is consistent. So for example, here you can see that the y-axis is pointing forward and you won't this also to be pointing forward in order to give you the most accurate result when rigging and when setting up your controls and constraints, right? So to do so, you can switch to the attribute editor by hitting the control a. And underneath the joints section, you can see that if we select the chin bone by zeroing out the x axis, you can see now that we have managed to flip the y-axis point forward. And by doing so, we have managed to fix the orientation of the entire chain. Now, everything is consistent down the chain. If we select this last bone here, you can see it doesn't match its parent object. But if we 0 out these parameters in the x, y, and z, we can make sure that the entire or the bone objects is matching perfectly with its parent objects. In this case it is the chin bone. All right, so this is how you can fix the orientation of your objects. Always make sure that you have consistent orientation across your entire chain. This will ensure you are setting up your rigs correctly later. Okay? Now, another thing you can do, if you don't know, for example, which axis here to adjust. For example, you want to adjust the x-axis, but you are not knowing which axis to adjust it. You can go over to the display menu under the Transform Display, select the Local rotation axis. And this, if we deselect the joint, you can see now the x-axis is pointing downward with the y-axis pointing forward, and the z-axis pointing to the side. It's a little bit difficult to see it from here, Let's hide the model from the display layer. You can now see better the local orientation axis of this joint objects. And now, if you want to, for example, to twist this joint objects, you know that the x-axis is the one you want to use to twist the joint. So you can see now that yes, it is correct. The x axis is the one. Use to twist axis. Okay? If you want to turn this feature on the local rotation axis off, always go to the Display under the Transform Display. Local rotation axis. If it's already visible, if you check it, it will be hidden. Alright, so that looks really good. This looks cool. We have seen that the Move tool can be used in the local orientation and the world rotation. The rotation tool also if we hit the E key and if we switch to the world orientation, we can now rotate this bone objects according to the World orientation, according to this, here, to this world orientation axis. But if you want to rotate it locally according to the joint itself, rotation or orientation, you can click and hold the E key and left mouse button. So like the object option. And now you can move and rotate the joint objects locally according to local orientation, right? So this looks really good. I just want to mentioned how this is going to be very important. I think you have seen now how this is going to influence the way you break your character. If you have some joint objects not matching quite a bit, you can get some unexpected results when setting up your controls. And so it is very important to consider understanding this topic. Now before you continue learning character rigging. 7. 06 Creating foot joints: In this lesson, we will create food joints. So in the last lesson, 12 talks about the orientation on objects and how that can influence the way you set up your ribs. Now it is time to go in and continue creating the foot bones. Okay. So to do that, Let's switch over to the right view. And from there, let's go to the skeleton menu and grab the create joins option. From here, what we can do is click and drag a joint here and place it right where the ankle or the end joint of the chain is. Now the reason why we did this. It's so if we just clicked right underneath the ankle joints, this will continue creating the chain and we'll attach that joined to the ankle bone, which is not what we want. We can still do that, of course, but this will not give us full control over the rig. So that is why we have to create a separate joint chain and attach it the ankle joint to give us some more control and flexibility over under rig. So let's undo that by hitting the control z. And let's click. Let's hit the Enter key to finish the creation tool. And let's grab the joint creation tool again. And now this time and we'll click away from the ankle bone and drag it where that ENCO bone is. So something like this. We will make sure to snap this in the right spot. So now we won't just an approximation of the position. And now what we can do is we know that the first or the heel or the ankle rotate from this place. Now we want to create another joints to control this section here, which will also rotate up and down. I think a good place here. For example, the good. So this place here we can show this section or the foot of the character, this piece parotid from around this pivot point. And now what we can do is just click another time to create an end point here, which will simulate the toe of the character. And this will help us later to simulate a foot roll or a total row, which we can use to make sure this entire section or the entire foot roll around this toe. Pivot points here. Now, once you finish the creation process, hit the Enter key, and that will end the creation process and give you the newly created choice. Now let's switch back to the perspective view and let's see where that change was placed, is placed here at the center. Now what we can do is head back to the channel box. Bye hello In the console a. Now what we can do is go ahead and underneath the display layer, Let's turn off the Mega Man layer, and this will hide it so we can see better where we place our joint objects. All right? And so this is why we have mentioned that creating display layers will help us in the reading process. And now you can see how it helped us a lot to hide the Mega Man model easily so that it cannot interfere with what we do here. And now what we can do is grab this chain here and move it and place it right where it should be right around the ankle bone. A better approach to do this is by holding the V key and the middle mouse button and drag this, and this will automatically snap to the bones are objects you want, right? This is a really cool way to snap objects, is by holding the V key and middle mouse button. Drag and this will snap this to the right position. Right, cool. Now let's bring back our Mega Man model and see how the orientation of that chart looks. It looks great. What we can do is actually you can see that the foot is at a bit of an angle here. What we can do is actually go over to the attribute editor. And from there under the joints section, we can start adjusting the joint to fit inside the model. But as you can see, if we, for example, add a control objects, that control is going to be at an angle. You can see that the If we now start rotating by hitting the E key and grabbing the rotate tool, you can see that the foot joint is rotating at an angle and that's not what we're looking for. So to fix this, what we can do is selecting the foot bone, hearing the shift P 2 on parented, and then selecting the new created bone object. The fourth one is makes sure to grab it. Let's turn off the model so we can see it more clearly. You can see this is the fourth joint. To make it easier to select, you can go to the radius, grammar and middle mouse, control drag to make it a little bit smaller and easier to select. You can do this here as well, but this is not going to be big of a deal for this section here. So what we can do now is by selecting this joint here, we can now start to adjusting its values here. For example, you can see that the x-axis is pointing forward. So what we can do now is let's 0 out every transform value here. And now we can start fresh and start adjusting this point, the x. We want the extra point forward. So we want this to rotate around the y axis. Let's put a value of minus 90 degrees. And this now looks pretty good. The orientation is matching across the chain. So now what we can do is select the foot bone here and select the ankle bone, press the P key and that will pairing those bones together. And so now, if we grab our model back and turn its visibility on, Let's bring the Attributes editor. What we can do is now you can see that we are able, finally, to adjust the rotation of this food chain without any problems. You have solved that. First time, we couldn't adjust them because there were some messy values. And things needed to be reset back to their default parameters in order to affect or in order to do this operation. Now you can see that everything is matching perfectly. The y-axis pointing up in the entire chain is inborn here. We can 0 out every parameter here in the joint orientation and that will match its rotation to the rotation of its parents. And now you can see that the 0, we have 0 in every parameter here. And that means it fits or it matches perfectly the orientation of its parent object, which is in this case the foot bone. All right. Everything looks super clean and super good. Things looks quite nice. If you feel that you have your joint objects a little bit small or big, you have the option to go underneath display, underneath the joint, the animation you can check or click on the Joint Display and it can form here, adjust the size of them globally. Or you can click on each one individually and from the radius parameter under the channel box, you can justice individually. All right, so that's pretty much it for this lesson. We have learned how to add and how to clean up the joint orientation of the foot bone. And how to adjust that perfectly fits within the foot of our character. Let's move on to the next lesson and start talking about adding some IK system to the leg. 8. 07 Renaming and Organizing our Scene: In this video, we'll spend a little bit more time renaming an, organizing our C. Okay, so in the last lesson, we have managed to add the foot joint and the food chain for our character. Before we move on and add the IK system for our model, let's spend some time renaming our subjects or this chain of bone objects. Okay? So this will be very handy when it comes time to, for example, scanning. When scanning, we will be able to select much easier. The bones are objects with specific names. For example, this root joint here. We can, for example, have this renamed to, let's say bn underscore L, underscore pi 01. And I will tell you why I have specified this name here. So I have given a bn so that we can easily know which bone objects are going to be skin to. The bone objects that will not be skin too. And when not influence, the mesh will be given a name of B, E, bone end. However, the bones are objects which will deform our 3D character. It will be given a name of n so that we know when it comes time to scanning that these bone objects with the prefix of bn, those will deform our model, okay? The underscore L tells us that the, this bone here is the left side of the character, not the left side of us. The left side of the character is the one we will be using here. So for example, this is the left side of the character, and so this is the bn L phi, the left Ty Jones of this character here. Okay? So the left side is referred to the left side of the model. The character thigh is self explanatory. The joint is placed in the spot where the thigh bone is. And so I have given it the thigh name and the 001 suffix right here is going to be very handy if we, for example, had the Control D and duplicate this object. You can see that this, we'll be given a 02. And so now we know that this is either a duplicate objects that we need to remove or do something else with. So you know that this is an added duplicated objects. Let's hit Control Z to undo it. Now I will go ahead and continue renaming our chain. This will be given a name of btn underscore, underscore Chen 0, 1. This is the chin bone which will control the area of the model. And this will influence the scanning of the model. So it will be given Bn. And for this and bone here, this will not influence the skin or it will not form the skin. So we will give it be underscore L, underscore NCO. This is meant to represent the ankle of the character. And this, however, we're not deform the character, but it is going to serve a very important purpose when it comes time to setting up an IK system for the character. So this is the one that will give us, or we will set the handle to control the IK from. So we'll see that in the next lesson. Now, the food chain, this one here is going to control or the form, the character. So we will give it a BN prefix, underscore L, underscore NCO 001. Next up is the third, and this will also influence the skin. So I will give it VN underscore L, underscore foot 0, 1. This end, the joint here will not deform the character. This will serve to apply a RAAS system later when we get to that. And so I will give it the prefix of b underscore, L, underscore foot. All right, This looks very nice and clean. This chain needs to be parented to the, let's hide the model for a bit to see clearly the chain bones. So the foot joint needs to be parented right to the ankle joint. So we will do that. So it follows the chain when we apply the IK system the next lesson. So the entire foot will follow the IK leg when we will apply that. And so this now looks very cool. You are nice and clean. All right, everything is renamed properly. We will learn in a later lesson how to mirror the entire chain across to the other side very easily without spending more time doing that manually. And we will learn a very good tool that will allow us to do that automatically. And it will also rename it automatically for us and give us the right naming for the other side. Another thing we can do at this point here is let's go ahead and grab the outliner from the Windows menu. Grab the outliner. And from here, what we can do is you can see that we have AGRP this as a group and have grouped every object or every 3D object inside this group here to easily select it. What we can do here for this chain is also creates a group by hearing the Control G. And this will create a group for the skeleton here of all these smart objects and place them under this group. Let's call them skeleton underscore, GRP, right? And later when we will start adding some other objects, like for example the IK Handle, we will create some groups for that as well. This group, we can, for example, this is not meant to be transformed at all because we will create controls dedicated for that. So we can highlight every channel parameter and click on lock and hide selected. We can leave this visibility parameter here so we can easily hide and show our group. All right? If you want to bring back those channels, you can go to the channels and channel control. And here you can find every parameter here, for example, translate X, Y, and Z. You can click and move to the left. And now we have those here brought back. We can highlight them and select, Unlock Selected, and now we have those brought back. But I will highlight those again, and lock and hide selected because we don't want to move or transform this group. We won't just the visibility parameter to control its Visibility. All right, so the outliner window here is going to be very important when organizing our scene. Alright, so that's pretty much it for this lesson, we have talks about how to rename and the approach to follow to rename our objects and how to organize our scene a little bit more using the outliner and using groups. So let's move on to the next lesson and start adding an IK system to our character. 9. 08 Difference between FK and IK Systems: Okay, so before we add a IK system to the leg chain of our character, let's talk a little bit about the differences between IK and FK. So as a rigor, as you start developing your skills, you may come across these two different terms. They are actually kind of opposite each other. We have the FK system and we have the IK system. So the FK stands for forward kinematics and IK system stands for inverse kinematics. So let me illustrate and show you the differences. I will go ahead and under the skeleton, we'll grab the Create Joints. Let's switch over to the right view to assign view. Let's put our character to the side because I want just to show you the differences. All right, I will create a chain resembling to a leg like the one we have created for our character. This is called an FK chain by default, this is an FK chain, meaning that if we grab the rotate tool here in the E key on your keyboard, the parent, the most parents are objects will drive the entire joints or the entire chain. Okay? So we have the parent object, which will drive the child objects, and this child object will in turn drive its child objects, right? So we have the most bottom child which is driven by these parents are objects here. And this parent objects will be driven by the parents and the grandparents of the entire chain. So I hope this makes sense. It is kind of very straightforward. So we have the very top objects controls every other objects underneath. So we have the child objects is parented underneath this object, and this object is parented underneath this object. So this is the forward kinematics. But on the other hand, the IK system, if we go ahead to the skeleton menu and grab the Create IK Handle to grab is parameters. We can see that before we get into the creation of the IK Handle, we have two options to choose from. We have the single chain solver and we have the rotate plane Sobel. The single chain solver will create an IK Handle. And if we rotate the IK handle, this will also twist the IK chain, which is not always what we want. Instead, we won't have full control over the rig. Sometimes we need to set a control to control just the rotation and that twist of the IK system. This option here is kind of limited because the IK Handle, once it is created, it will control the choice of the chain. However, if we select the rotate plane solver and creates an IK handle, we get the chance to add other control objects. She can show the twists of the chain and this in turn give us more flexibility over the rig and how the rig performs. So now, we will select the rotate plane solver, since it is the one we will be using in this course. And let me click on the most top objects here, which is going to be the tie. And we click on the root joint. And the next selection is going to be the most bottom child, which is this bone here. Now, once that's created, Maya will give us this handle here called IK handle on. If we use the move tool by hitting the W key and we start move this around. You can see that we get a really nice move. It resembles the way a human leg moves. But you can also notice that now the move or the behavior is totally different this time because we have the most bottom child. It is the one who controls the most upper parent. The action is kind of inverted. If you think of it this way, the action is inverted and that's why it is called inverse kinematics. So the action is inverted because the most bottom child is go into control, the top parents. However, when we have done this using the forward or the FK system, the action was going from the top parent all the way down to the child. But now the action is inverted. The we have the IK handle attached to the most bottom child and the most viral child is now controlling the entire top chain. So you can see the inverted behavior we get arise. So that's the difference between the IK and FK system. And as we move on and as we progress in this course, you will learn a lot more about the differences and how those can be applied to our rake hero. 10. 09 Adding IK System to Our Character's Leg: In this video, we will go ahead and add an IK system for the left leg chain of our character. So in the last lesson, we have learned about the differences between the FK system and the IK system. Now let's go ahead and since now we know a little bit about the differences between both systems, let's now add an IK system to the leg of our character. So let's go ahead under the skeleton menu. Let's grab the IK handle. But before we do that, let's switch over to the right view. We want to work in a side view for best results and easy select the joint. Now let's go ahead to the skeleton menu and choose the Create IK handle. Let's click on the square here to display the options. And since we know that the rotate plane solver is better and give us more flexibility in terms of control. Let's select this. And now we want to select the upper thigh joint. And the next joint. Next we will select is this b, e underscore, L, underscore ankle. This is the one that we will not skin too. And we talked about that in a previous lesson. We said that this bone here will serve to connect the IK system together and this will not be skin too. So this is the one we want to select. So let's click on that next. And now, once we finish the creation process, maya will give us this IK Handle, which we can rename to icky underscore, underscore handle or underscore leg, since this will control the left leg of our character. Now, by selecting the IK Handle and using the Move tool. Once we start to move this around, you can see the beautiful result we get from this IK System. It simulates the behavior of a real life movements of the leg joints. Okay, this looks very cool, beautiful. Let's switch back over to the perspective view and see this behavior from a different angle. You can see how this looks. Great. And when animating this, this will give us really cool looking animation and performance. Okay, let's hit the Control Z a few times. So bring this handle back to its original position. Now, once we have this IK Handle created, we want to go ahead to the outliner window and we want to create a separate group for the IKEA's to go inside. So let's select the IK Handle. And with that selected, let's hit the Control G to create a separate group that we will call it IKEA's underscore, GRP. Again, this group will serve mainly for organization purposes and not for transformation. So we will not use this group to transform the IK Handle since we will be creating separate controls for lag. And since it is going to be used just for organization purposes, we will select and highlight every parameter here. Right-click and choose lock and hide selected, leaving just the visibility parameter here so we can switch it on and off if we want to hide it or show it. All right, so this looks really cool. Now, in this lesson, we have created the IK handle for the character. You can see how this will give us really cool looking deformations when it comes time to scan in animation of the character. Let's now move on to the next lesson. And we will start mirroring this entire chain here to the right side here, using a very nice tool provided by Autodesk Maya. And that will help us to save quite a bit of time creating the other side. So let's do that in the next lesson. 11. 10 Mirroring Joints: Hello and welcome back. In this video we will talk about how to mirror this leg on this left leg joints to the other side. Alright, so we have the option to do this manually and go ahead and switch to the left view and start creating this manner Willy, you have that option, but we want to save some time. And since Maya give us a really nice tool to do so, less benefits from using that. So this tool is called the mirror Joints. So we will grab this from the option box here. And what we want to do now is let's make sure we reset the settings by clicking on the edit and reset settings. So let's make sure to select the root joint, in this case, which is the BNF high. So we have a few options to consider here. The first option, the x and y. You can take off this like a plane drawn from this gizmo here, from the y to the x. And this, if we use this plane here to mirror our chain cross, is we'll place the mirrored chain to the back of the character, okay, which is not what we want. Let's see the x z option. The x g option is the same plane as this grid here, and it will mirror this chain downward across the x g chain to the down position. Okay, downward is we'll flip it and place it down or which is also not we want. So what is left here is this y z. Okay? We need now to mirror this across to the right side. And the YZ option will be the best choice or option to use. Since the y and z. If you see this gizmo here, the y and z is the plane that matches what we need. Okay? So if we mirror, cross the y and z, it will mirror it across to the right side in the right position. Okay? So this is optional, we will go with, okay, so we have two options here for the Merv functions, we have behavior and orientation. The behavior is self-explanatory. It will mirror this chain across the other side, but the, also the parameters or the transformation values will be mirrored as well. So if we, for example, select this joint here and start to rotate it, it grass. If this joint rotates here, the another joint will not rotate in the same direction. It will rotate in the opposite, giving you a mirroring behavior to the joint, which is what it's called here behavior. The orientation option is the opposite. When we create the mirrored objects, it will not create a mirrored behavior if we rotate, for example, both chains in the, for example, the y axis boat will rotate in the same direction. Okay? So this is the differences. In our case, we want to select the behavior. And now for the replacement names for duplicated joints. This will help us in renaming the order created joints. So for example, we can search for a word or a letter and have that or have Maya changing that to another specified later or prefix name here. And Maya will do that automatically when mirroring cross to the other side. For example, when we have been creating this chain, we were adding this underscore, underscore and this what we will use in order to rename the other side. So we will be searching for this underscore, underscore. And when Maya will be merged our joints, Let's tell it to change the underscore, underscore to an underscore, R underscore. So we know that the other chain is in the right side. So if we now click on the mirror, you can see the Maya have renamed successfully every objects to be an RPN. And the nice thing about this as well and this mirroring tool. If we go to the Windows under the outline view, if you go under the IK is group, you can see that Maya have also created an IK handle for us. For free. You can see that there is also giving it the right name. So now just grab this under the IK is group. Organize this a little bit more. And now you can see that Maya have done a really nice job in mirroring and creating the other side for us without any efforts and automatically and very accurately. Okay, So this is a really nice tool to use to save you a lot of time when creating joints for the other side. 12. 11 Creating Torso Joints: Okay Then, so in this lesson we will go ahead and start adding some torso bones. So our Mega Man, a character. So in the last lesson, we have managed to successfully mirror the left leg chain to the other side. And we have learned a really nice tool provided by Maya that does that for us automatically. And so now let's go ahead and make sure to add some torso bones that will perform the upper portion of the body of our character. So the first thing that we will need to do is go ahead and create a root joint here. So let us hide the model to see clearly the joints. This model here is to go under need this display layer. So right-click and select, Add selected, so it is hidden with the remaining objects. And so now what we can do is go ahead and add a root joint. So before we do so, I want to talk a little bit about a problem that you may come across when adding this root joint. For example, let us go ahead and create a root joint from the rigging menu. I will go ahead under the skeleton menu, choose Create Joints. I switch to the right view. And let's make sure to V and click, hold down the V key and click to make sure that the new created bone is snapped right to the position of the joint. Once we have that joint created, Let's hit Enter key and let's go back to the perspective view. Now, let's move this to the center. Now this is the problem. If this joint here is not deadly positioned in the center. Let's see, for example, let's say that this is a little bit off. And then we parents those two psi objects underneath this route joints. Now take a look when we will start moving or rotating this root joint back and fort. Have a look what's going to happen. So we have a really annoying boggling occurring in Denise of our IK System. That's not what we want. Okay, So when we rotate this back and forth, we have this really weird and annoying boggling effect in the knees of our IK systems. And so this will cause some issues when animating. You have to counter animate the legs or the knees to avoid or to cancel out this effects. And this will add more time to the animations and you have to do some more efforts to cancel out and these effects here. So to avoid this from the star, what we can do is let's get back to the defaults. A state. We will delete this one here. And what we can do is try to create a new joint here perfectly at the center between these two, Ty Jones. So how to do that? Let me show you. Let's head over to the Create menu. Unless grab a locator, this locator objects here in minor is very important when it comes to creating sophisticated regs and sophisticated setups. It serves as an empty objects that you can use. Create some nice, really sophisticated setups. And as you develop your 3D regain skills, you will see that this locator here, where we use quite often as you read characters and as you work more often with Maya. So it's located here. We can use it to as a place holder to center that root joint that we will create. So now to position this locator here between these two, Ty Jones perfectly at the center. What we can do is benefit or make use of the point constraint here provided by Maya. This point constraint will help us to, for example, if we select this, if we want this locator here to follow exactly the position of this type bone. We can use the point constraint and that will constrain the movement or this locator to the position of this type joint. Now we want this to be in the position between the two, so we will select two objects. First, the two parents always make sure to select the first, the two objects that will constrain to. And then the last selection will be the objects that will need to be constrained in this instance. Is going to be the locator. Now if we go ahead to the constraint menu and select the point constraint option, Let's grab it from here so we can get the options. Let's make sure we reset the settings, make sure the maintain offset is off. We'll see later how this option work. This option will help you to maintain an offset if it is already there or if you want an offset bar, if you want the object to snap right to the position of the objects that you want to follow. You can uncheck this. So we will leave it now uncheck, and we will create the point constrain by clicking on the Add. Now take a look. We have this locator snap right, between the two parents objects, okay? Now since we have two parents, the object will give the locator or the point constraint applied to do locator will give us the average position between the two parent object. In this case, these are the left thigh and write psi. Now what we need to do now at this point is go ahead to the outliner and grab the points, the locator. Let's expand this and grab a point constraint and delete it. Since we will not use that anymore, we want just the position of that. Okay? Now we have this and the center of these two objects. Let's duplicate that and grab one other by hitting Control D to control the will allow you to duplicate an object. And let's wrap this up. Let's make sure to bring back our model. And from the right view, Let's turn on the wireframe so we can see clearly where this locator is. So we will position this right where the next stars, right? So at a position like so. And so this, these two locators now we will use them to snap joint or to snap creates some joints. So let's hide the Mega Man layer and let's head back over to the outliner. We want to hide also this leg chains. So we will grab the skeleton group and let's put in a 0 value and the visibility parameter or to hide those as well so we don't accidentally snapped to the leg chains. Now what we can do is go into the skeleton menu and choose the Create Joints. Now by holding the V key and left mouse click, we will create a joint there is snap automatically to the position of the first locator. And then what we can do is V snap again by holding the V key and left mouse button. And then we will create another joint right at the position of the second locator. So once we have that created, hit the Enter key. Let's bring back our model. And let's switch back to the perspective view. Let's click on the smooth shaded option, smooth shade, all. And as you can see now we have this really nice looking torso joints that we will need to add some joints and segment in order to give us more flexibility and more articulation points to our back of our character. So to do so what we can do is go to the right view. Let's click on the wire frame on shaded to see the wireframe, our character. And let's go ahead to the skeleton menu and click on Insert Joints. This will give us the option to segment this entire source of bone. And let's collect and the root and dread. We will drag one bone here unless collect again and those joint and drag. And this will give us another bone that we can Left mouse and drag to position it where we want. Alright, so this will be the chest bone. We can position it right here. And let's hit the Enter key to finish the creation process. Now let's go to the perspective view and let's see how those bones we're created. This looks great. Okay. If you want to adjust this after the creation process, you can use the Insert Pivot option by holding the D key and dragging by using the move, this move gizmo and holding the D key, you can readjust the pivot of each bone objects, and that will give you the option to readjust the joint objects separately. All right, you can use also the Insert key to do that. Okay? Now we have those really nice place joint objects. So we can do now is rename them. Let's grab this and we named as this will be the, actually the neck which we'll recreating in the next lesson. So we will call this VN sense. We will scan this too. So we'll use this to the form our model we call BN underscore neck 0, 1. This one is will be btn underscore chess, 0, 1. Since this will form the model. This will be VN underscore back 0, 1, and this finally will we be an underscore root 01. All right? So this is going to be pretty much it for the tarsal bones. We have managed to create the root, the back, and the chest. The orientation of each joint objects seems to be consistent, which is always what we want to look for. We want to be consistent across the entire chain. When it comes to the orientation of joint objects. And now let's stop right here and move on to the next lesson, where we will start creating the neck and head joints of our character. So let's do that next. 13. 12 Creating Neck & Head Joints: All right, So welcome back. So in this tutorial, I will show you how to continue creating the neck and head bows for our character. So to do so, you can see that we have managed to create a neck joint in the last lesson. And what we need to do now is just continue creating that chain. We can still use a separate chain for the neck and head joints, but That's totally fine. You can just go with the one chain as a beginner or as you develop your reading skills. But as you start getting more advanced, you can learn new techniques that will help you to create more sophisticated controls by separating joint chains. Okay? But now at this level, we can just use one chain to control the head bone and attach this to the entire tarsal bones. So to do so and to continue creating the head and neck chains on top of the torso goes, what we need to do is let's switch to the right view. Okay, let's go to the skeleton in the create joints. If you have a difficult time to see the joint, you can switch to the wireframe. And now you can see that here is the joint. Can click on that. And now you can add a new phone object. You can hold the Shift to create a straight up joint. A position similar to this. This will represent the head bone. And you can hold the Shift key again and create another joint at the top. This will be the tip of the head bone. Once we finish the creation process, Let's hit the Enter key. Now you can see that when we clicked on the BN or the neck bone we have created in the last lesson is to continue creating a chain. The newly created chain is already parented to the last or the previous one. You can see now we have this new head bone that is parented under the joints or under the neck joint. All right. So let's have this one named. It can minimize the size, the head joint a little bit, something like this, by adjusting the radius perimeter, middle mouse and control drag. And let's have this renamed to be an underscore head, Z11 sense this will control the deformations of our character. Let's do that for the hip joint as well. We want to call this underscore head and says This will not be influencing the skin of our model. This will be called p0. All right, Very cool. Now let's switch to the perspective view. Let's hide the model for a bit to see the newly created bone object. Okay, now we have the neck bone, we have the head bone, and we have the tip of the head bone. Right? Let's make sure that the orientation is consistent. You can see that the y-axis is pointing to the side for the chest. And let's see for the neck. Now you can see that for the neck, we have a little bit different orientation. Let's try to fix this. Let's head over to the attribute editor by hitting the control a. And under the joint section with the neck bone selected. Let's see which axis is going to control the twisting. This I think is going to be the x axis. And you can see that the x-axis is already having this 90 degrees. Let's 0 this out and see. And now you can see that by zeroing out the x axis in the neck joint, we have managed to match the orientation of the tarsal bones to this new creative neck joint. And you can see that every other child objects under the neck joint already have their orientation match automatically because the parent objects is now matching perfectly to the orientation of the torso joints. Alright, this now looks great. Let's now bring back our model. This switch should be smooth shade all to see the model. Okay, everything looks clean. If you still want to adjust after the creation process. If you want to adjust the position of the joint, you can grab the move manipulator by hitting the W key and move the joints to wherever we want. For example, if you want the head or the neck to rotate or to articulate from around this position here, little bit backward. You can still do so the head also you can still, if you want this to be a little bit for rule or a little bit to the back. So you have the option. Everything is up to you. But in our case, I want them to be swayed up in a straight line against the tarsal bones. So I think there are placed in a good position here. And this can give us a little bit better articulations. Okay, so now at this point, let's stop here. And we have managed to create the neck and head joints. Let's move on to the next lesson and we will start adding a pelvis joints to the root of our skeleton. 14. 13 Adding Pelvis Bone: All right, welcome to this lesson. We'll start adding a pelvis joined to the root of the skeleton. Alright, so you have two options. You can either grab the entire chain we have created for the torso and duplicate that, for example, and rotate that downward and then delete. The boy is not needed. For example, these guys here and use this and snap it to the exact location of the pelvis. But we will go for another route and we will create a new chain for the pelvis. So let's turn off the visibility of our model and let's switch to the right view. From here, what we can do is grab the Create Joints tool. And let's hold the V key and left mouse button and snap a joint rise at the position of the root. All right? And then we can click again to add another joint. This time you can hold the Shift key to create a suede down joint, and we will hit the Enter key to finish the creation process. Now what we can do is grab the model again, turn its visibility on, switch to the perspective view. And we can select this bone here and grab that up a little bit to position it to make it fits inside the model. And from this point here, we can start renaming this joint to be VN, since it's will influence the deformation of the model. We'll call it d n. And we'll copy that and paste it over to the next joint. This one will be B, since it's when not influence the skin. Okay, this looks really cool. Now at this point what we can do is go over to the outliner and the skeleton group here we want to turn its visibility on so that we can see the already existing or created the Ty Jones. And now what we can do is grab both tie joints and the pelvis joint lasts and hit the P key to parent those under the pelvis. Okay. And what we can do now is make sure to choose the pelvis and parent it under the root joint. Okay. All right. Now we have the bn root, which is the parent of every object. So the root bone now is the parent or the controller of every object or every bone objects in the hierarchy. What we can do now is you can see that when we parented this root, it gets out of its skeleton group. Let's middle mouse button and drag it to the under the skeleton group. Okay, good. Now let's test this out. Let's close the outline or window. Let's grab the pelvis bone and start rotating that. All right. You can see now that we don't have that bug align effects, that wobbling effect we get in a previous lesson, I have showed you that by creating the root joint right position at the center between the two sides, Jones, we can make sure that we don't get a bubbling and facts when we rotate, for example, this in the world y-axis, okay? If we, for example, didn't create that a dissenter and this route was a little bit off. If you start rotate that you can see that you can get a wobbling effect. But now here we are not getting that because we have made sure to create that right positioned at the center. The same thing if we grab now the root. You can see that when we rotate this back and forth in the y-axis, you can see that the leg system is planted nicely and nothing is boggling, right? This looks nice and clean. But you can start testing this out by rotating. This is like so you can see the nice little behavior we get are starting to get some nice behavior from our system. The same goes if we select the pelvis joint, we start rotating this around. You can see the nice looking effect we are getting, right? This looks beautiful. Okay, so in this lesson we have managed to create a nice-looking pelvic bone and parented every Thai objects and route together and created a successful skeleton for the upper portion of the body. Let's move on to the next lesson and start working on the arms of our Mega Man character. 15. 14 Creating Arm Joints: Hello and welcome back. So in this video, I will show you how to create the arm joints. All right, so Maya, the recent versions of Maya have added a really nice feature that allows you to create joints right in the middle of a geometry. So we can benefit from using that. Let me show you how to do so. Let's go to the top view, this sign. And since we are going to be working with a preferred angle to make that bend in the elbow so that later when we add an IK System, maya will know how to set up that IK system and give us a nice bend the elbows. So we want to create the arm joints from the top view, okay, so we can see easily the band that we create, but I think that the helmet here is getting in our way. So let's go back to the perspective view and I want to introduce you a nice little trick that you can use to isolate the objects that you want to work with in Maya. So we can grab, since we want to use or to create on joints, we can isolate the body and the left on geometry. And we can do so by selecting the body and the arm geometry. And go ahead to the show menu, choose these isolates, select option and select the view selected option. The keyboard shortcut for that is Control 1. So if we hit there, you can see that now we have just the body and the left geometry isolated. And now we can work much easier and easily create our arm joints. So let's now go to the top view. Let's switch to the wireframe. Only. See the wireframe of our model. Let's go to the skeleton menu and grab the Create Joints option. From here before we start creating the arm joins, what we need to do is go into this option here that is called Snap took protected center. And this is the option that will allow us to create joints right in the middle of a geometry. Okay, so let's turn that on and we won't, the model needs to be selectable in order for this feature here to work. So now what we can do with that option on and when our create John's option is selected, Let's start adding a shoulder joint. Now, one thing you need to keep in mind before creating the shoulder. You can see here that we have too many options overlapping. And this can cause Maya to do some extra work and sometimes it doesn't know the right middle of the given object. So what we need to do, we need to click in a place where we know that Maya, we know the middle of that object's case. So for example, this position here seems to be good book by the end of the creation of the joints, we will grab that joins and reposition it or re-adjusted to fit in the right position. So we now we only do this to provide Maya some accurate positioning information. So let's now click to position a shoulder joint. And we want to add a, an elbow or the forearm bone. So I think position, this position here is going to be great. Now, this model here can be a little bit tricky, but Mega Man here, it has this mechanical forearm. So this will actually represent the forearm of Mega Man. So we will place a joint right at this position here, something similar to this. And you'll notice that I have gone ahead and add a slight bend in the creation of this joint chain. And you know that because we have talked about the preferred angle and how that can help Maya understand the bend direction of the arm. So you need to provide Maya would that preferred angle in order for the IK system to work when we start setting up this later, okay, now we have plot an elbow joint. So the next joint that we will add is going to be the wrist joint. I think this position here is going to be good. And once we finish that, Let's hit the Enter key. You can see the bend that I was talking about. The spent here is so important the IK system to know which direction the band is going to be in. All right, so this looks great. Let's check this from the perspective view. And here's the magic. You can see how Maya has successfully place those on joints right at the center of this arm here. This looks very good. Now what we can do is start repositioning some of these joints to fit in there. Right position. So this shoulder joint needs to be pulled back a little bit. Okay. So it needs to rotate from around this position here where the articulation of the shoulder is. So something like this. Let's switch to the front view and do that so we can select the shoulder joint and grab the position or the move manipulator and less stop position it like so. Or you can do something else. You can hit actually the D key, the insert pivot points, and do so. And this will just adjust the selected pivot of that selected bone without adjusting the entire hierarchy, which can be sometimes useful if you don't want the other bones to be adjusted as well. So let's now, by holding the D key, I'm now able to use this manipulator or distMoved manipulator to place that bone where I think it fits nicely. So something like this. You can see that the shoulder can rotate nicely from around this position here without any collapsing. If you put or if you pulled back this, if it's too much in you can start getting a lot of collapsing into shoulder and in the chest of the character. And things start to get a little bit off. So you need to place this in a position where it's will articulate and simulate the behavior of a shoulder. So something like this. This looks great. Okay, I think the shoulder here rotate nicely without collapsing. Okay, Unless now see, let's go to the perspective view and see. And this looks actually great. You can see that everything looks nice. We have the shoulder joint, we have the elbow or the forearm, and then we have this wrist bone. Okay. So so far, this looks pretty good. Everything looks nice. Let's now stop here. And let's move on to the next lesson, where we will add in a clavicle bone here for the character. 16. 15 Adding The Clavicle Bone: So this is where we left off from the last lesson. It looks kind of creepy, but the goal here was to show you how to isolate objects and how to work more effectively with objects in Maya, we have seen a nice little tool here, the snap project to center that allow you to place joints right at the center of a 3D model. And now let's go ahead and continue creating the clavicle bone for our character. You can do the same thing that we did from the last lesson. You can use this feature and grab the Create Joints and place that joint right from the top view or the front view, depending on what you see, it's better. But I think in this case, what we can do is just go ahead and use the already existing joints that we created in the last lesson. So let's duplicate this by using the Control D. And let's pull this back. Like so. Let's grab the child's and remove them. And to do so, to grab the child of the selected object, you can hit the down arrow key, and this will grab every descendant objects, or you can use the up arrow to grab the parent. So in this case we want the elbow, the duplicated elbow joint. So let's delete that. And now we have left with this unique joint lice. Go ahead to the front view and stop position in this where it needs to be. So when it comes to the clavicle bone, you need to position it from around a position similar to this. Why? Because the clavicle area of a 3D character, it needs to be little bit planar or straight to the neck of a character. This is the natural position where it needs to be. So if we start to rotate this later, when it comes time to animate and you can see that the clavicle will move more naturally and give us nice results. If you do this and place this little bit backward, things can get a little bit awkward and unnatural. And so the same thing goes if we place this too far to the right or to the left of the character, so it needs to be in the middle. So something average like this. If you need to see clearly the neck of the model, Let's go into the showMenu isolate selected and unless the activate the view selected to bring the entire model in. You can see that the neck of our model is about here. And so let's grab the clavicle bone and place it somewhere here. So this looks cool. The clavicle bone will affect this area here. You can not see much at this time, but when it comes time to skinning and animating, you will see the effect of the clavicle bot and also you will see the effects of the shoulder joint. So now what we can do is grab this joint on this clavicle joint and less duplicate this by using the Control D. This bone is not going to be skin to, it will serve as a parent to the arm joint. So now let's select this point here, and that selects the clavicle joints. And let's hit the P key to parent dose. Now what we want to do is place it right at the center of the shoulder joint. To do so effectively, less hide the model and less hold the V key and middle mouse button. Drag this to the shoulder joint. To be able to select this more easily lists drag or minimizes size from the radius parameter. And let's check this from the perspective view and to see now how things looks. Great. All right, this looks fantastic. All right, Let's bring back our model and swish the smooth shade 0 to see the results. I think this joint here is a little bit of an angle. What we can do to fix this, I want this to be facing straight to the side. You can see that when we duplicated this, the already duplicated joint was already in at an angle. So let's fix this. Let's now open the Attributes editor and let's 0 these out. All right, this now looks great. Okay. Perfect. And less now physician, this again by holding the V key and middle mouse button to the shoulder joint. All right, this looks fantastic. Now. That looks nice. Let's rename these. Sends. This will influence the skin of our model. We will call this btn underscore L on those core clavicle, 0, 1. Let's hit the down arrow key to grab its child. Let's rename this to be underscore L, underscore clavicle. This will not be skin too. Let's now grab this bone here. This is going to be the influencing shoulder joint of our character. So we call this btn underscore L underscore shoulder 0, 1. And now the remaining joint is going to be VN underscore L underscore for on 01. And the last tip bone here is going to be the wrist btn underscore, L, underscore row is 0, 1. This will also influence the skin of our character, right? This looks super cool, super nice. This shoulder bone is need to be parented underneath The below the clavicle. So let's select the shoulder bone and the clavicle hit the P key to parent those. Okay. And now if we select the grandparents, you can see that everything is following. Nice and clean. You will see later why I have parented this. You will see why would I have done that when it comes time to setting up the IK system for the arm. 17. 16 Creating Hand and Finger Joints: Let's go ahead now, star some wrist and finger joints. So we will be doing the same thing we did in the last lesson. So let's switch over to the rigging menu. And we can either work with the rigging shelf. You can see here all the tools dedicated for the rigging or we can go ahead and grab anything we want from the toolbar. Okay. Also we will be working with the same feature that is a projection Center we've been using in the last lesson. So let's switch over to the top view and let's not stop creating some joints. We will switch to the wireframe mode to see better where we place our joints and we will place the first joints right about here. Okay? Something like this. This is going to be the root joint. Next we'll place the middle section, so something right about here. Then we'll place the end section here and the tip bone as well. Now let's switch to the perspective view and let's check to see if the joints were placed in the right position. And as you can see, Maya have successfully placed those in the right center of the index finger. This looks great. Let's bring them with D. Let's select them first. And we can move those, put those back a bit and up. Something like this. Let's move on and start working on the middle finger, will duplicate the index finger and use the CEJ, the same chain as the middle one. Let's duplicate it again using the Control D and use the new chain for the ring finger. Nonetheless, duplicate once more and use that for the pinky. Perfect, this looks great. Let's bring this down a bit and polish back. Similar, something similar to this. Pull it down a bit. Okay. Now let's grab this up. And let's go ahead to the attribute editor while selecting the root joint of the index finger. And we can go ahead and stop orienting our joint two points in the right direction. So we will use the joint orients options. You can see now I am orienting the joints in the z-axis to points a little bit down. Okay, So something similar to this. Great. So at this point here I'm just playing around with the joint orientation as well as the joints placement to get some more natural results when we start scanning our model. Okay, so this looks fine. Now. Let's go ahead and now start working on the middle finger, will start orienting the roots and the z axis. Okay, the same thing. So something like this. Let's move on to the middle section and start working an only thing that as well. And we will start moving the end section, something like this. And also the middle section. We will move that for the bit. The same thing for the end. We'll grab this and pull it back a bit to fit more nicely within the middle finger mesh. Okay, this looks great. About taking now the ring finger joints. Let's start rotating those bid down in the z axis using the joint orientation. And the same for the middle. We want to rotate that down a bit into the z axis. And we can go ahead and start orienting the end section and the z-axis as well. Okay, So we'll now go back into the middle section and the root. Stop, adjusting those as well. And let's move on to the pinky now. And we want to move the middle section. As well as the end section. So now just adjusting the positions of those so that they fit better in the, inside the mesh overall, I'm also orienting the route so that the joints or chain of the pinky fits better. Okay, now everything looks great. Let's start now working on the thumb. So I will duplicate the index finger joints and move them downward. Let's move this here. Moving the y-axis. Let's bring it back. Pull it back in the z. Okay, so I'm just now positioning this route or this joint chain here that will represent the thumb joints. So I will now rotate or flip the orientation of the y so that it matches the orientation of the other fingers. So the y-axis needs to be pointing upward. Okay, So that is the same thing I'm doing here. So I'm just playing around with the rotation and orientation of joints and try to match them to the ones we have already done for the other fingers. So I'm now going to reorient the middle section. And I will bring the thumb chain bid down. Okay, this looks great now. So pretty good. Everything now looks great. Everything is fitting nicely within the fingers. Okay, Now we will start creating a wrist bone so I will duplicate the already existing one. This will be the wrist tip bone. This will not be skin too. So let's move this up here. So let's move this up here and less parents it back to the wrist bone that we will be skipping two. And let's have this renamed to be E underscore L underscore race 001. Right, super cool. Let's have all these joints here renamed. So I will start renaming these. I will give him a naming convention of the root joint is going to be a vn underscore L and the score some underscore a 01. And we will rename those alphabetically. So the wrist joints will be renamed alphabetically. So this is the b is going to be b, from b, this is going to be from C, and so on. For this here is going to be bn underscore index l, index a 0, 1. This will be btn underscore, underscore a middle, score, a 0 or one. And this one here, middle, VN underscore L, underscore RNC a 0, 1. And you get the idea, the rest or the remaining one is going to be bn on the score L underscore pinky a, 0, 1. So the others will be the same. I will go ahead and stop the video or pause the video here and I will rename the others and get back. Okay, so I have gone ahead and finish when naming the other joints. You can see the naming convention. I was following. Okay. So at this point here, what is left to do is taking the root joints of each finger and have those renamed to the wrist tip bone of the wrist. So like this. And we'll select the thumb rule joints and we will parent that to the restaurant. Okay, so like this, see now everything is following. Just wonderfully, super cool. So I think now everything is looking great. You can still go ahead and spend much more time placing your finger joints precisely in the right spot. And the next lesson, let's mirror the joints of the arm to the other side. 18. 17 Applying IK System to the Arm and Mirroring Across: Hi and welcome back. So everything looks nice and clean. So far. Everything looks so good. Okay, So we have managed in the last lesson to create the finger joints and parent those under the wrist bone. Okay, So now what is left to do is go ahead and sit up and IK system for the O. Now one thing I might go ahead and fix or tweak is this clavicle bone. I think I might go ahead and slide this backward a little bit. So it is flushed with this chest bone. It is not needed actually, what I think this is going to give us better deformations. So what I can do now is grab this clavicle bone and grab, move manipulator and hold down the D key to switch to the insert pivot mode. And then let me slide this bit backward. Okay, I'm not go ahead and switch to the right. You see this better? So with the clavicle bone selected that we had D or hold down the D key and slide this until it is flushed with the chest bone. Okay, So something similar to this. All right, let's switch back to the perspective view. Right now. Things look a little bit better. And now what we can do is start setting up the IK system for the arm. So let me go ahead to the rigging menu from the skeleton menu, and we'll go ahead and create the IK handle. Or you can do this from this menu here as well. This tool bar, and this is the rigging toolbar. We have many toolbars he available for each mode or for each specific work that you do inside Maya. So for this instance, I will go ahead and click on the regain toolbar to bring that up. And I will click on this Create IK Handle. He is a third one from the left. Now what I can do is click on the chest bone first and then click on the wrist bone. All right. Maya has now successfully added the IK system like this, this out. By having the IK Handle selected, let's use the Move tool and start moving this around. And you can see everything looks super cool. We have a nice bend in the elbows thanks to the preferred angle that we were using or creating prior to the IK system. Again, the preferred angle help Maya to understand how to bend or to set up the bend direction of the IK system. Everything looks super cool. Super nice ride. This will give us some nice effects when we start scanning and animating. All right, Let's hit the Control Z a few times to go back. And now with the IK Handle still selected, let's have this renamed to IK underscore L and the score on 0, 1. Right? This looks super cool. Now, what we can do at this point is mirror this chain, cross to the other side. But before we do so, let's go ahead and grabbed the clavicle bone and have this parented underneath the chest bone. So we will grab the clavicle bone first, then this chests wound next hit the peaky to parent death. And now what we can do is grab the clavicle bone. And under the skeleton menu, Let's grab the mirror, John's option, okay. And you can see that we have those options already there from a previous lesson where we have set up the right chain or the mirroring of the right chain. So we still have those options here. We can still use those sense we are mirrored across the y and z plane, which is The same option selected here. And we still need to have this renaming conditions here. So we need to have Maya change the underscore L underscore to an underscore, underscore, since we will have this mirror to do right side. Now let's hit the applied and see what happens. All right, so Maya had successfully mirror this cross. But you can see now that we have a little issue, it's not an issue actually. Bus Maya didn't actually mirrored the IK handle. So why is that? Simply because the joint that we have grabbed, it is the clavicle bone here. And the clavicle bone is not directly attached to the IK system of the left. So we have just the shoulder and every child objects that is directly connected to the IK system. And so the clavicle bone was not part of that connection. And that is why when we selected the clavicle bone and mirror data across, it hasn't taken into consideration the IK that was part of the other chain of the shoulder. All right. But it is so easy to fix, we can just grab a bone here on the right shoulder and use again the Create handle option. Select the let me zoom in a little bit. Select direct shoulder and select Next the right wrist. And there we go. Now we have the right arm IK system setup. Let's bring that back and have this renamed to Ikea underscore, underscore arm 0, 1 arise. So this looks fantastic. Let's do a little bit of tests here. So we will grab the chess. He can see everything is moving beautifully. Everything's nicely. Okay. Let's check it back. See, okay, so this looks fantastic. Let's grab in the root. Stop moving this around. And you can see the nice little behavior while getting. This will look even better when we start scanning the armature or the skeleton to the model, which in fact is what we are going to do in the next lesson. So in the next lesson, we're going to start scanning the skeleton here and applying that to the model. So it starts to form the model and give us some really nice effects. So let's go ahead and do that next. 19. 18 Skinning Our 3D Character: Welcome back my friends. So in this lesson, I will go ahead and stop talking a little bit about the scanning process and why we are going to do this prior to setting up controls for our character. So what is scanning? Scanning is actually the process of binding or having the skeleton or the bone? Object to the form. The model without skinning, we cannot actually inform the model. So by using skinning, we can have the skeleton or the bone objects to influence the points and faces that construct a model. Okay, cool. Now why we are going to do this first before we start sending up controls for our rig. That's a very important question to ask. Actually, when the reason behind this is that we can easily manipulate and adjust the weighting and the effects of each ONE objects to each vertex or section that needs to control arise by having no controls. And stocks cleaning right now, we are going to have an easier time adjusting and manipulating the weights and the effects of the scanning of each joint objects. All right, So now let's start applying that skin to our 3D model. So the first thing we will need to do is grab the bone objects that will need to skin too. And this is where the naming scheme we were following into now will be very handy. And actually we will grab just the skeleton bones that start with a prefix of bn. And to do so, let's go right here to this section here. And let's in fact selects or click on this icon here and switch from the absolute transform to the select by name. The selects binding feature in Maya will help you select objects with their name. So if you type in here a name of an object's Maya, we'll go ahead and select that object for you. So now we will start by hearing or typing in Vn underscore. And we will do a little trick here. That is, we'll put an asterix key and that will go ahead and grab every bone. So let me do that again for you to see clearly what I have done. So deselects everything. Go ahead to the select by name field, okay? And type in B and the prefix b. And to grab every bone objects that will deform the model, just the boat objects with a prefix of bn. So we'll type in Vn underscore and we will add a wildcard. The wildcard serve as a little bit like programming or coding. It will TO Maya to grab the everyday objects that have the prefix of Bn but ends with whatever name comes after. So btn underscore and we'll put an asterisks or the Times character, okay? And this will tell Maya to grab every bone object that again with the prefix of Bn, but ends with whatever name it comes after. Okay? So let me hit the Enter key. And right away you can see that Maya have grad. Every ONE objects within prefix name of pn. Okay? So now at this point, what we can do is go ahead and grab the model that we want the skin to. Okay, Let us grab every model objects by hitting the shift key. Okay? All right, this looks fantastic. And with everything selected and S Now, go ahead to the skin menu design and choose the Bind Skin option. And let's click on this square icon here to bring up the option box. Now, from this option box here, what we need to change is few things here to get better results. So the first thing that we will need to change is this bind to, we will select or change that from joints, hierarchy tool selected joints. And that's because we won't to skin just see the selected objects that we have gone ahead and select from the select by name, menu or field here. So we won't justice Kinsey, the bones with a prefix of bn. Okay, So that is the first option here. The bind method is actually a very important option here to switch will change that from the closest distance to heat map. So you can think of heatmap like, for example, the heat distribution. You can have, for example, a bone objects that form the closest points to that bone object will be formed more and things will start to gradually decrease as the vertex, vertices get away from the specific bone objects. Okay? So that is the heat map option D weight distribution here. We'll change that from the distance to the neighbors. So the next thing, what will change is the weight distribution from neighbors or from distance to the neighbors. And that will make sure that Maya were not go ahead and distribute weights, two points that we not need to perform. For example, this option here will help Maya to not, for example, when the children start to rotate, Maya will prevent the points or the thigh points from moving. Okay. So just the shoulder area will be affected by the shoulder bone. All right, Next we have this max influences. And you can actually have that tool set to maintain max influence or you can uncheck that. And that would actually prevents my FM adding more weight or more influences to the mesh model. You can have that as well. So I will go ahead and uncheck that. So we are free to add more waste as we need. And now we'll go ahead and use the Bind Skin. I think everything here is set up correctly. Let's use the Bind Skin click. Okay. And Maya, we go ahead and take a little bit of time depending on your computer power. And we'll go ahead and skin every bone. Object to the selected, all the area near to it. Or go ahead and pause the video until a Maya completely finish the process. Alright, so the scanning process has done. Maya has finished scanning the entire model to the selected bone object. Let's go ahead and go to the outliner and grab the left IK handle of the testing that out. So we will use in manipulator tool and start moving this around and take a look. This looks wonderful. And we hide the outliner just so you can see clearly what is happening here. So this looks fantastic, beautiful. Everything is performing very well. Maya has actually done a really nice job at scanning those points or the model vertices to the selected von object. Let's now grab the root or the back. Let's grab the roots and see. All right, everything is looking good. Now you can see that we have few objects of Mega Man. We have the head and the left or the right arm, as well as the right foot that are not following. Okay. That is completely fine. Sometimes the heat map option of the skinning tool doesn't know how to affect certain models. And that is because, for example, we have the head here and the face that are intersecting. And so Maya, they didn't know how to skin that to the head model. So what we can do is grab the head or the helmet and the face and less go to the bodily menu. And let's combine those together so that we have just one unique objects here to work with. We can rename this who had to be organized. And now what we can do also is go to the meshy on the Mesh menu and go in to this clean up option. And we will go ahead and clean the model. We will select D under the remove geometry, we will select this non manifold geometry unless had the clean up geometry. All right, Let's now go back to the object mode and we can go ahead and do now is grab this head here and still go to the Edit menu here. And what we will do is delete all by type and delete history. And that will go ahead and remove every node here and collapse everything together. So we have at the end, a really clean mesh work with. So again, selects your mesh. If you have problems, always make sure to clean up the mesh prior to applying the skin. So we'll select the head mesh. We will go to edit the least all by type and delete history that would collapse every node that was here together and give us a really clean model to work with. Now at this point, we will select the head and we will select the head bone, go to the Skin, grab the bind skin, the option. And since we were using the heat map in the previous example, now we will switch it back to the closest distance. This is the default option that was here. We will leave this to select a joint so we know that my skin only the head geometry to the selected bone, which she is the head bone in this case. And we will use the Bind Skin painless, test this out. Now you can see that the head is following nicely with the head bone right there. Everything looks so cool. You can do this as well here you can grab, if you notice, let us see the rise IKR. You can see that it is not following and you can now repeat the process that we did here. You can just since have this as one unique objects. You just need now to grab every bone here. Okay? Oops, selects every bone here, right? Great. Let's select the forearm and the wrist. Let's select the right forearm, the hand, and go to the Skin, bind skin. Let's leave this option as they were less hit the apply and let's check this out. Now let's go to the Windows outliner. Let's grab the right on IK Handle. Unless start testing this out. Okay, this looks fantastic, right? Great. Super cool. Wonderful. All right, we have managed to fix that problem. We had. Okay. You still need to go ahead and repeat the same thing here for the first, now you know the process. Okay, So we just want to repeat what we have learned until now. And that's pretty much as you can see, that we have some nice information going on in our model, but still we have some collapsing here going on. You can see that under the shoulder we have little bit of collapsing here. So that's what we are going to discuss in the next lesson. So in the next lesson we are going to learn how to fix the waiting and the scanning of our model and how to make the deformations look even better. So let's go ahead and do that next with our Mega Man saying goodbye. 20. 19 Things to Keep in Mind When Skinning: Okay, So in this video tutorial here, I just want to talk about some issues that you might encounter when you skin your skeleton to a character like the one we have here. So let me show you what can happen. So in the last lesson, we have gone ahead and skin the skeleton here to the character using that band scan tool here and using the bind method heat map. Now the heatmap, in some cases here, it will create some problems, especially when you have a 3D character like the one we have here. I have said a character like the one we have here. Because the character we have here, the Mega Man character is or have separate pieces. Okay? It is not a unique piece or model. So we have separate objects here. And so in some instances, that heatmap option does not work as it should when we have a lot of pieces to skin too, especially some pieces like the head for example, if we move this around to demonstrate, you can see that it is void or it is empty inside and we have some other pieces attached to the head objects. So in cases like this, let me show you what can happen using the heat map option. If I go to the outliner and grab the D, for example, let's say the the rise IK Handle. Here is the problem that you might encounter k. So we have some pieces that are following, just fine, but other pieces are not following as they should. So they are not taken into consideration. The same thing here applies for the head. So you can see that it is not following as it should. Okay? So we have some problems here when using the heat map option. So in this case, what we can do is restart the entire process. And we will use another technique to fix this problem here. So what we can do is delete or eliminate that skin cluster or the skin we have in our mesh. What we can do is select every mesh objects. So just the 3D meshes, the polygon meshes, select everyone here. And what we can do is go ahead to the skin menu and use the unbind skin. And this will eliminate every skin closer. That is controlling the deformations. Okay, What we need to do is go ahead to the Edit menu, delete all by type and delete history to clean up every mesh object. And then we can go to the Modify and freeze transforms to clean up even more the transforms to set up a new origin to every objects here. All right, so everything looks clean. Rate. What we can do in this case is we have two options in the scanning process. So when it comes to a 3D model like this, when we have separate models that construct the entire 3D model, we can either scan one by one. For example, we can take the head geometry and skin that to the had bone. We can go to the Skin menu, bind skin and this sign, since the heatmap can cause some issues if that doesn't work for you or it can do is go ahead cd heatmap and change that back to the closest. This is. You can now hit the apply or the Bind Skin. And right away, if you start rotating this around, you can see everything is following nicely. Okay? This looks good. Let's bring back the topology of our model by enabling the wireframe on shaded option. Okay? Or so you have this option, okay? So you can skin the mesh you have, for example here, the left geometry on the left arm geometry, we can select that and select every finger and hand bone that need to form this or this only mesh here. And you can use what we have seen right now, the closest distance under the bind skin method. Okay? For example, if you select the body geometry and select the bones that will form their only and use the same process. Okay, if we go here to the chin, we can select the chin. They use the chin bone and use the bind skin. Closes this. Fly that okay. If we now go to the outliner and grab the left IK handle, if we start to rotate this around or you can see the fats. So now we have this chin bone that is driving only this chin geometry. All right, so this is one option. However, if you want to take another route, me go back a few times to undo. Okay. We still have this skin cluster, so we'll go to the under the skin and unbind skin to get rid of that skin closer, right. Good. We have another option, as I have told you, so you can go ahead and attach these objects into one unique objects. So we are going to select every 3D piece here. Okay? And what we can do is go under the modeling menu, choose Z mesh menu and use the combined. Now we can see that by selecting one geometry, we have now the entire body mesh selected. Now we have combined every 3D objects together, which will give us this unique 3D character here. Now by doing so, what we can do is now go to the under the Edit, delete all by type delete history to clean up the mesh. And now what we can do is go to the select by name field. Here we have every bone objects, pn underscore and percent asterix to grab every object that sauce with a prefix of bn, hit the Enter key. Now we have selected just the bone objects that need to deform the mesh that starts with a prefix of vn. Now what we can do is go ahead and select our mesh. Go to the, go back to the rigging menu under the skin, bind skin. Now we will use the closest distance option again, bind skin. And now you can see that Maya, I have gone ahead and skin successfully without any errors. Our mesh. We still have some issues here. Now this is a skin wearing issue, so we will learn how to fix this. We just need to wait every points here to follow the head 100%, okay? So we will learn how to do that in the upcoming lessons. But everything here looks so good. Let me go ahead to the outliner and grab the right IK leg. And it will start to move this around and you can see everything now is following just fine. See the left IK leg, right rate. So we have some issues here in the skin ways, but we will learn how to fix those in the upcoming lessons. All right, so we have learned in this lesson how to fix some issues when it comes to the heatmap options that we will use into skin our character, and how to optimize our model to perform better in the scanning process. 21. 20 Tweaking Joints Placement After Skinning: Okay, So in the last lesson, we have learned how scanning is very important. In order to start the four main, our 2D character, we have learned also that skinning simulates how the scanning of real human work. So for example, the scanning of a real human being. So we have bone underneath the skin which are controlling and the forming the skin. So the same thing applies in 3D softwares. We have the skeleton here, which, using the scaling to provide it, go into the form, the 3D geometry. All right, great. Let's now move on and talk about a nicely the tool that you can use to start adjusting the pivot points of your bones after the scanning process. Okay. So let's say for example, that you won't this chest bone, you want this to be readjusted. For example, you want this to be a little bit lower. Okay? So at first glance, what you would do is grab the chest bone and start moving it around. But as you can see here, it drags. Okay, it drags or the forms, the character as it moves. And that's not what we need. We won't it? Just, we want the bone on the chest bone to move alone without influencing the character. Let's try to use the insert pivot point by holding the D key and start manipulating the pivot of the bone objects. And you can see this also affects the the geometry as we are moving it around. And that's not what we want, of course. So let's hit the Control Z to bring it back to the fourth state. And now what we can do is use a dedicated tool for lab provided by Maya. This tool is located here under the skin menu and here is the move skinned joints. Click on there. And Maya will give you the option now to start moving this bone without influencing the surrounding geometry after the skinning has been applied, of course. So now we can use the Move tool and start placing this around. However, we want less dense this out and for example, we will bring this forward. I'm just doing this to demonstrate the effects. Okay, let's now switch to the selection tool by hitting the Q key or using the Select tool here. And now let's test this out by selecting this chest bone and hitting the Iike to start rotating. And you can now see the new pivot point around which the chest bone is rotating. This new pivot point here, okay. Can see the new effect. Let's now hit the Control Z a few times to go back. And let's do this again. I will go ahead to this menu and go all the way down, choose more skin joints. Let's now this time. Move the chest joint all the way back. This is awkward, I know, but I'm just demonstrating how this works. So let's say, for example, that we want this to be the new position, our chest bone. Let's now grab or switch to the Select tool unless there's this out. And now we can see the new location of the pivot of the chest bone. This is now around which the chest we're wrote it. It's now useless. I know things. Now it looks unnatural, awkward, and ugly. But again, as I have said that before, I'm just demonstrating how that tool works. All right, Let's hit the Control Z a few times. Callback. Okay, and we want to go through the skin again, move skin joints. Let's bring this to its default position. Something similar to this. Let's go back to the Select tool and start rotating now. And now you can see everything is looking so good. All right, super cool. So that's pretty much it for this lesson. I want to talk about this awesome tool that you can use to readjust the pivot points of your objects after this skinny process has done. So let's now move on to the next lesson and we'll, we'll talk about a nifty tool provided by Maya, which is called the hammer weights tool, that will allow us to average the scanning information of the geometry. So let's go ahead and do that next. 22. 21 Working With The Hammer Weights Tool: All right, then I'll come back. So in this lesson we will discover a nifty tool provided by Maya that will allow us to average and correct the deformations in our model more easily. All right, so let's now go ahead and use the switch to the wireframe or shaded to see the topology our model. And before we start adjusting the weighting of our scanning, Let's go ahead and set up a little animation in the arm so that we can easily fix any deformations as the animation is playing, right? This will help a lot to see where the deformations are off and help to clearly identify places that needs to be fixed. Okay, so let's go ahead to the outliner and let's grab the left IK Handle. Us use the manipulator or the move manipulator. And let's setup in animation. Okay, so bingo, congratulations, we are going to be adding a little animation to this character. And to do so by selecting the IK on the left IK handle, let's press the Shift W. And that will set keys in the translate fields of our IK handle. So just the Translate fields. So now you can see that those has been colored to a red color and that means that we have a keyframe set up. Now what we can do is go ahead and do the animation timeline and progress to the 20 frame, okay? Something like this. And what we can do is actually go over to the right bottom here corner, and you can see this little icon. This means the auto key-frame toggle option. And by enabling this, It's, we'll set up an automatic key frame as the, as we change or move the IK handle. So now if we go ahead and grab is IK handle and move it to this side, something like this. Okay? Now if we play this, you can see that we have nice little animation. So congratulations for setting up your first animation. So this is how animation work. You set up keyframes and change the position as you set up keyframes and Maya and your computer will automatically translate and work to set up in-between positioning, right? So you can see now nicely the effects animation we're getting. And now the little tool that we are going to discover in this lesson is going to be very handy. For example, areas like this. You can see that we have some rough edges here that needs to be smooth. And a little bit, you can see this here as well. This place here needs to be a little bit smoother. So what we can do is go into the vertex selection mode of our geometry as click on Geometry, right-click and choose a vertex. Next we will select, for example, these vertex, vertices here. Okay? Something like this. All right, great. What we can do now is by selecting or having these points selected, Let's go under the skin menu and choose the Amer skin waste. This is a tool that was talking about by selecting this, look, what's going to happen. Boom. You will notice that the points have been average a little bit to accumulate or to smooth out this region a little bit. So I will go ahead and press Control Z to see the difference. Control Z to go back and Control Y to go forward in time. So you can see the difference. Control Z, control Y, Control Z before, Control Y. After. You can see now the result is a little bit smoother and much better. If we grab and slide our timeline slider, you can see the results. We're getting much better results. Let's do that here as well as select these vertices here. Okay? Let's now press the G key. The J key will allow you to repeat the last US to all go ahead to the skin menu and use the hammer scan ways. Boom, you can see now the result. Okay, so let's see, here's the before and Control Y. Here is the after, before. After. Things are smooth a little bit. Hey, Maya has gone ahead and smooth this region and make it average. So the position of vertex have been average, so that it gives you a little bit more beautiful results rate. So everything looks nice. We can use that here as well. You can see that this region can be a little bit average, okay? And smooth. Let's go to the skin and Hammer, skin ways, rest that and you can see here's the before, here's the after. Great. Okay, So things looks ARE good. And so that's the hammer skin weights. It allows you to average the points of your mesh. Okay. And that is very important, does scanning. So you want every bone objects to be controlling vertex, but those vertices need to be average a little bit to give you a smoother result, right? So I always prefer to start with the Haber Skin Weights tool to average the position of the vertices. And then after that, okay, I go ahead and use the tools that we will discuss in the next lesson, which are the component at Earth. So in the last lesson, we will use or learn how to use the Component Editor to even more adjust precisely each vertex and each bone influence. Okay, and also in the upcoming lessons, we will discuss the paints ways to, which will allow you to paint manually by hand the influences of each bone objects. So let's go ahead and discover that next. 23. 22 Introducing The Components Editor: All right, So far, so good. So in this video here, I will introduce you to a very wonderful editor that you can use to start adjusting the weights of your scanning. This wonderful editor is going to be the components adder. So before I will show you that, Let go ahead and we still have that animation play on around from the last lesson by IQ. See that we have some issues here. So the ear here is grabbing with the left IK handle. So the left hand is grabbing the ear of our character. All right, so this is going to be a very good example of how to use the components editor to fix this. All right, so what we can do is go ahead with the animation. We will go ahead. We'll put our time slider where we have the animation or where we have that problem to see better. The issue we have. Let's now go to the, oops, I select or objects or our model here. And let's go to the faces components. Let's double-click to select every face. All right, or what we can do is go ahead and grab every piece here. Oops. Let's select Control or Shift. Select every phase here by using the Shift key and also double-click to select every mesh we have here. Alright, so something similar to this. Now we have the entire head geometry selected. Let's now convert our face selection into the vertices selection. And we can do that by holding the Control key and the right mouse button and go to the vertices, and go to vertices. And this will converts your face selection into vertices selection, right? Great. What we can do from here is go ahead to the Windows menu under the general editors, we can grab the components editor. So this is the Component Editor that we will be discussing in this lesson. I know it seems a little bit intimidating. First glass, especially if you have never worked with something like this before. But it's actually very easy to use and you will see that. So the first thing that is listed here is our selection. So the vertices that we have selected here in the head of our model is, are listed here. So you can see listed by numbers. So vertex 0, 0, 12. Okay, So we have every vertex less said here, all the way down. If you go down, you have approximately 2 thousand vertices selected. That's a little bit too much, but we need to select those in order to fix the problem we have here. And here we have the bone objects that influence these points here. So every bone objects there is listed here, is going to be controlling these points here. Alright? So basically this Component Editor shows you the vertices or the influence these vertices have. Okay? So these vertices, we have selected our controls by all these bone objects here. And this is why we have this issue here. So these vertices here needs to be controlled only by the head bone. Okay? So you can see here that the head bound does not have the 100% influence or control over these points. So we have other bones that control the points. You can see that some bones here have a little bit of influence where others have a little bit much. Okay. We have the bone head here that needs to control Foley these points. And so what we can do is we can go ahead to the bone, head here. Click on the first field here, go all the way down, click Shift, click the last field, and put in a one. The one means a 100% is 0, means no control. A one means 100% and we have in-between values. That means the bone control more or less the vertices. So if I type in now one and hit D. Turkey, watch, what's going to happen when I hit the Enter key. Okay, Great. So we have managed to successfully weighted the points around the head to 100%, be controlled by the head. Go. Alright, so Grace, you can see now we have fixed that problem. And what you have noticed here is the bones that were controlling the head previously disappeared. And that's because we have this option here, hide 0 columns enabled. So if I deactivate that or uncheck that, maya will bring in all those bone objects, despite the fact that they are not controlling any more of these vertices. Okay? So you can, and influence from other bones if you want to. But in this case, hiding the bones that are not influencing these points here is going to be very handy to see just the bones that have influence over these vertices. So what I'm going to do is go ahead and check again the high 0 columns. And you can see now that it's only the bone or the head bone now is shown, we still have the chess joint here. We can go ahead and select all that. And typing is 0 to eliminate the influence of the chest bone over these influences, right? And now you can see that just the head bound is now controlling these vertices 100%. You can see now, if I close this window, we have managed to fix the issue we had before, right? So far so good. We have still this area here. We have some issues. In the chest area. It is a little bit collapsing. So add it means that the head or the arm bones are also influencing the chess, which is not good. So we won't just the chest bone to influence this area here, 100%. So what we're going to do is go to the edges design. And we will double-click to select an edge. We will shift, Double-click again to select another edge. Okay, great. Let's go ahead and double-click to grab the remaining edge loop. We will double-click here again, and here again. Double-click. And while holding the shift key to grab the loops, right, great. Now we have managed to grab that. Those edge loops, Let's shift. While holding the Shift, let's double-click on this edge loop here to select it. And now what we can do is go or Control right mouse button, two vertices and two vertices. And this will convert that edge loops we have selected into vertices. Now what we can do is go back to the general Editors under the windows and select our components editor. Okay, so now we know the process. We know that we won't just the chest bone here to influence this area. You see from the Component Editor that this is not the case. We have many other bones that are controlling these vertex and that's the reason why we are getting this collapsing. So here is the chest or the chest bone will select the first field. Okay? And score all the way down. And shift select the last field unless cyclin B1. And boom. This looks so good. We have corrected those collapsing issues we had, right? So you can see now that those vertices are just being controlled by the chest bone, right? So the 0 height or high 0 columns are now hiding the bone objects that have 0 influence. And that means also that we have just one bone which is controlling these vertex. And that is the only bone that is visible here. All right, great. So this is the components editors. You can see how it is so useful to start with to clean up the areas where you have unwanted deformations. You can select by vertices or by edges and faces and then convert those two vertices. Because the components editors works with vertices. So you need to always start with faces and edges and then always convert those vertices. And then go into the components editor and adjust the weighting according to what you need. So according to the bone objects that you want to influence those points. All right, so now this looks fantastic, right? So we have managed to fix the head and the chest area k. So we are going to go ahead in the upcoming lessons and learn more techniques to fix issues in the deformations. So for example, let me go back to the object mode and we go to the outliner and go select the IK, left IK leg. And you can see here that this region here, V sub B mechanical something. Or we need to feel this object here the objects is hard, so it is a hard surface, it is a mechanical surface in Mega Man. So now you can see that it is little bit soft. So this is not what we want. We want this to be o, to behave like a mechanical piece. And that's where we are going to be using the paints weights too. So we are going to pay to be painting this manually and bringing in more influence from the chess or from the bone to control this area and make it look more like a mechanical piece. So we are going to discuss how to use the paints ways to, here in the upcoming lesson. 24. 23 Refining Skin Deformations Using The Paint Skin Weights Tool (Part1): All right, great. So in the last lesson we have managed to fix the deformation issues we had round the head and also around the collapsing that we had in the chest area. Now everything looks cool. Now in the last lesson we have seen an issue, another issue in the legs of our character. So let's go ahead first send eliminate the animation that we have added in previous lessons to the IK of the arm. Let's go to the windows, the outliner, and we will select the left IK handle, the less highlights the translates channels. And we will right-click and choose break connection. And this will get rid of the animation that we had. Okay? Now what we can do is go ahead and select from the outliner. This is still open, so select the left IK handle on the leg. And if we start moving this around, look what happened. Okay. So we have little bit of dragging. So on the left handle of the leg is dragging also on grabbing the mesh or the right leg. Right. So okay, so you can see the effect. This is not what we want. So we will fix this in this lesson and we will learn a really awesome tool to do that. And that tool is going to be the Paint Skin Weights tool. In order to use that, Let's first grab the mesh, select that. And under the skin menu, we can use the Paint Skin Weights tool. Grab that from here, from the option box. Or we can use this icon here if you have, use this menu here, if you are using this menu in the rigging menu, you can grab it here, this is the icon of the Paint Skin Weights tool. Now, from here, it can seem a little bit intimidating, but it's very easy to use. And I will show you how that works. All right, just follow me and you will be good to go, right? Great. So once you select the mesh and go to the Paint Skin Weights tool, you will notice that the mesh turns completely black and that's totally fine because now you are seeing the influence of each bone objects Over the mesh. So for example, you can see now that we are selecting the foot bone. And the first mode is, this, is this bone here, this tip bone, this entire bone right here. Okay. And you can see that the white areas means that the areas that are controlled 100% by this bone. And as this gradually decreases, you can see that it turns gray and it turns into the black. The black areas means that this bone here has no effect over the black areas. Okay, so you can see now why we have this issue here. Let's now select the chin bone and see what happens. So you can either select the chin bone from the less here by clicking on there, or you can go ahead to the bone. You can see here and right-click over it and select influence. And this will select it as well. So we have two options. Either select it from this list or right-click on top of the bone that you want to fix or adjust its weight and right-click and choose Select Influence. And now you can see that this bone here, the chin bone, has barely effects or impacts over the mesh. And that's why we can see that it is dragging. So this area here, here needs to be completely white in order to be completely controlled by the chin bone. So how we can do that is very easy. So we will start now painting. You can see that the mouse, and actually when we started using the Paint Skin Weights sold or the mouse cursor have changed this paint icon. So the paint icon, we can see that we have a radius and you can control that radius by holding the V key and dragging with your left mouse button to adjust the size of the brush. Great. Again, hold down the left mouse button, drag to adjust its radius. Great. And now in order to start painting. These areas. So the selected bone, again, make sure you are selected the bone. And now from this place here, the paint operation. We have a few options here to take into consideration. We have replace at scale and smooth. First thing always when you start blocking in weights, the first step that you need to do is start with the replace, the Replace function here. We'll make sure that each vertex that your paint is have this value here. This is the value that will be replaced when you are painting over the vertices. So if we start painting these areas here with the replace method selected, this value here will be assigned to each vertex and that bone will control fully 100%. You can take on this value. He has 100%, the 0, 0%, and we have in-between values. So the one means 100%. And if we start painting with one, with the value of one, these areas will be white and will be controlled 100% by this bone. So let me show you that we will decrease the size of our brush by holding the geeky and left mouse dragging and using the replace, we will start now painting. And right away you can see the effects of that. I will decrease the radius a little bit. And here's the effect that we get. You can see now that we're able to adjust and to bringing some influence over these points here that were controlled by other joints. So now these points are fully controlled by the shin bone. You can see the effect of that, right? Great. Let's paint these vertices back in. Okay, it's so left mouse and stop painting. This is a really funny process and then you will love that as you start rigging and it using this tool. I love using this tool a lot. Okay, Great. Oops, that's okay. You can see now the effect of that weight. And now you can see, let me go to the areas here and install. Facing these n. Great, wonderful. These points is left here, so we'll paint that back, right? Great. All right, beautiful. One thing I actually forgot to do is add a little bit of animation to the IK leg here. So I will go ahead and do that. We will grab the left leg. We will use the move manipulator, bring that back. Right rate. So let's hit the, let's go back to the frame one and use the Shift W to lock down translate keys. And we will go to the frame 20. And let's bring that to something like this. See the effect. And of course you want this icon to be enabled. This is the automatic keyframe setting that we'll go ahead and put a keyframe automatically when you start adjusting the position of your IK handle, right, That's looking great. Now we can see better what's going on, right? Cool. And so you can see now that we have managed to fix that dragging that we had, but we still need to fix this area here. So this area needs to be controlled fully by the right IK chain. So grab the mesh and use the Paint Skin Weights tool again. And this sign we will select right-click over this. Right shin bone selects influence. You can see that the right shin is not controlling. These are the chin piece as it should. So it needs to be controlling it 100%. So what we are going to do is use the replace method. This profile setting here will control the fall off of the brush. So we have the solid here. This will help in blocking in the initial weights first, but as you are going to be smoothing or adding more influence using the add method, you will want to go ahead and start. Using these soft follows, okay, So we will see how to use that shortly. But now we will use the replace with a solid fall off and start blocking in some ways. So let's go ahead and start using this brush here. Again, using a value of one to make sure that these points are controlled 100% with that chin bone. All right, great. You can see now that things are getting back to there initially state. Okay, great. Okay, Fantastic. That's looking pretty great. Oops. Scrub a little bit to see the effect. Can see these points here are left behind. So we'll paint those back in. And we will paint this area here as well. Let's make sure we are selecting the right shin bone. And we will continue painting with the left mouse button and choosing, clicking over the vertices that we want them to be controlled fully by this joint here. All right, so I think you are now having the idea, okay, so, so you can see now the effect of that. Let's get out of the Paint Skin Weights tool. And you can see now we have managed to fix the chin area. Okay. So the right chain okay. Is not dragging with the left leg IK anymore. So we have managed to fix that problem we had before. But still, you can see that we have some issues in the left or the right foot and the ankle. Okay. You can go ahead now and use the Paint, Skin Weights tool and select the foot bone, for example, and try to paint this area to the right foot bone 100%. Okay, you can use next the ankle bone and repeat the same process and paint these, this area here to this bone here. So you have that option now. You have learned how to do that. So you can go ahead between lessons now and this is going to be your homework. Try to fix areas that are not performing very well using the Paint Skin Weights tool. Right? Now in the next lesson, we will go ahead and use a combination of the components editor, as well as some other techniques using the the ad and the smooth options here under the Paint Skin Weights tool. So we will learn how to use that. And we will use it in combination with the Component Editor to bring in some weights here and to clean up the mesh and the deformations even more. So let's go ahead and do that. Lacks. 25. 24 Refining Skin Deformations Using The Paint Skin Weights Tool (Part2): All right, cool. So in the last lesson we have fixed or managed to fix the issues we have in the deformation of the right shin. Also on the left shin. The left shin was dragging right Shemesh as well. So we have learned how to fix that using the Paint Skin Weights tool. Okay, so that was a really neat too that you can use to manually paint weight over the surface and the points that you want to be controlled by certain joint, right? Great SEO. You can see that I have gone ahead between lessons and fixed right chain as well as the right foot. But you can see that I have left, the left chain and the left foot for this lesson. So we can use a combination of the Paint Skin Weights tool as well as the Component Editor to fix areas that are somewhat hidden and the paint brush cannot reach. So in this instance here, we can still go ahead and use the Paint Skin Weights tool, from the toolbar here or from the skin menu, the paint skin weights. So of course you need to be selecting versus the mesh. And then now what we can do is go ahead. Since this area here, the ENCO mesh, this will be controlled by the ankle joint. We want to right-click over the ankle joint and select the influence to see the influence of that joint. Where IS can see that it is not controlling 100% this area here, we can still go ahead and use the replace method and use a solid fall off with a value of one. Paint over this area. You can see that we are fixing those issues here where our Vensim back those areas. Again, that the control of the left ankle joint. But as you start doing this, you will run into some areas here that are a little bit hidden. And if you are still going to be painting this, you may run into a problem of painting across areas that you don't want to charge. And so in this case, where the eight brush shoe cannot reach those hard spots, what we can do is switch to the components either that we saw in a previous lesson. Okay, so what I'm going to do now is go back the select tool. Let's go back and run our time slider to the frame one. And I will go ahead to the windows, the outliner, and grab the left IK Handle. And I will go ahead and break the connection to the lease, the animation. So I will highlight the Translate channels, right-click and choose break connections to get rid of that animation. Since we don't want it to be anymore because we fix that shin area in the last lesson. But now I will go ahead and try to fix these areas here. So we'll go ahead and use the Rotate tool and use the Shift E, The sign, of course, makes sure that the time slider is set to the frame one, shift a to lock down the Rotate channels. This sign, we will add rotate keys and go to the frame 20, and we will start rotating that up to see the issue we have. So you can see that in a previous lesson, I have told you that these are actually hard pieces. So Mega Man has this kind of robotic legs. And so these needs to feel like robotic legs. So they need to feel a little bit hard. But now you can see there are some was smooth and not behaving as mechanical pieces, so we want to fix that and that's what we are going to be doing now. So in order to do that, well, we can do is go ahead. And now we have the animation. We can grab or select the mesh and select, right-click select faces. And now what we can do is since this is a separate piece, this is a separate piece and this also is a separate piece. We can double-click. And Maya, we'll go ahead and select the entire piece. Since it is a separate piece, we can do so here again, this area here is a separate piece as well. So we will double-click on that. So these two pieces here needs to be controlled fully by this foot bone here. And so what we can do is use the Component Editor. But as I have told you before, the components editor work with vertices. So now we have a Hey, selection, we can transform or convert that into vertices by holding the Control key and right mouse button, two vertices and then two vertices. Now you have successfully converted the face selection into vertices selection. We are now ready to go to the Windows under the general editors. Let's go to the Component Editor. Okay, I think now you are a little bit familiar with this window here. It is a very nice editor to use. It helps in situations like these where we are not accessing, reaching certain points using the paint skin weights. And now you can start actually assigning these vertices V control to the left foot bone. So you can see now these vertices are controlled by many bones here, and we are not looking for that. So actually what we are going to do is go ahead and search for the left bone. You can see it here. This is the left foot bone. I will go ahead and select the first field and scroll all the way down and shift select the last one and put a value of one once I hit the Enter key, if I now start rotating or if I play this animation, if I scroll the time slider, you can see now we have successfully fix some issues we had, but still this area here needs to be fixed as well. So we will do the same thing. Okay, let's go to the face selection. We will double-click to grab this piece here, since it is a separate piece, by double-clicking on it, maya will go ahead and select all the faces. We will select this piece as well. So shift and double-click again. And let's convert those two vertices. Control. And right mouse button two vertices. And now you can see that we're still have the Component Editor open. But this sign, these points here needs to be controlled by the left ankle is the one actually the first one. So this is the left ankle bone. We will grab the first few, score all the way down, grab the last by Shift select and puts a value of one Reich rate. Let's now test this out. So you can see now by dragging the time slider, we have successfully managed to fix those deformation issues. Now you can start to feel a little bit the mechanical or bardic pieces of Mega Man. You can now start to feel that the legs now behave a little bit like mechanical pieces, right? Let's go to the Windows under the outliner, we will grab the left IK Handle. And as we start to move this around, you can see we have managed to fix those issues. And you can see now the nice Behavior we get. I think the pivot here needs to be adjusted a little bit. I feel that it needs to rotate from around this point here. Because if you see now you can see that it is a little bit high and it's not given us the NYSE or the fact that we are looking for, so we are going to fix that in a later lesson. We're going to move this, okay? Or what we can do is actually let's now do it now using that tool we were discussing in a previous lesson. So let's select this bone here. And let me go to the frame one, and let's break the connection and delete that animation. Now let's now by selection the first, I will go ahead and translate the pivots of that first bone here, little bit downward without affecting the skin. And so we have learned how to use that using the Move skin joints under the skin. So let's use the moves can Joyce course, make sure you are selecting the bone that you want to fix its pivot vise. Go ahead to the right view this time. And we are going to move this a little bit downwards, so something like this. Rate freely. Good. Okay, let's switch to the select tool and let's now go back to the rotate or TV perspective view. This foot or the toe bone. Actually, I will go ahead and translate that normally without using the Move skin joints because this is not a joint that was skin too. And I feel that it needs to be a little bit in a position similar to this because we are going to be setting a TO row in the top row needs to be rotating from around this point here. So a position like this is going to work just fine. And now if we start to moving, rotating this joint round, look the nice effects. We are now getting much more better. Okay? Now I think this is looking much better than the previous placement of the pivot. We had. K, great, for the good. Let's go to the outliner and grab the left IK Handle. Pay rate. Start testing this out. It looks great. I start moving this for joint. And now you can see the amazing results we are getting, right? Great. So this is actually getting a lot better. And you can see how we are getting, how this model is now becoming much more beautiful to use and to animate. Okay, this looks great. So what we can do now is start the lesson here. So you can now have the analogy possibility to go ahead and fix every area of the model as you wish. We will now how, you know, you now know how to use the tools dedicated to fix the skin. And so what you can do now is go ahead and use those tools to fix every area of the model that needs to be fixed, right? So let's go ahead and move on now to the next lesson. 26. 25 Refining Skin Deformations Using The Paint Weights Tool (Part3): All right, So far, so good. We're actually getting some nice results so far from the deformations of our skin. Okay, so we have managed to fix certain areas in the last lesson using the combination of the components editor, as well as the Paint, Skin Weights, saw, and hammer weights to right? So what I wanted to talk about actually in this lesson is that ad and smooth options that I showed you in a previous lesson. So we have this ad and smooth, okay? So I just wanted to talk about those so you know how to use them when you need them. Okay. So I will go ahead and search for some areas that will help us to identify or work with those areas more easily. So let me go ahead to the hands and fingers. You can see that these fingers here actually are grabbing. The thumb finger is actually grabbing a lot of geometry from the forearm. Okay? What I will go ahead and do actually is use some of the tools that I showed you. Now, let's select the mesh first and we will select the Paint Skin Weights tool. All right, Let's now right-click and select the forearm. And you can see that the forearm needs to control this area 100%. But this is not the case here. So let's go ahead and learn how to use the add. So we'll use the add paint operation. Now, previously we were using the Laplace, but now we will switch to the ad. The ad will allow you to actually add, so it is self-explanatory. The values you have here will actually be added each time you click on a certain vertex. So let me, for example, typing a value of 0, 1. If I click or left-click over this vertex, watch what's going to happen. So you can see each time I click, we get an added effect. So we are, I'm now adding 0.1 of the value to the forearm skin. So if I start too, you can see how the effects of that, right? You can see now the points are coming back to their default position. Okay? Sometimes you can work with even lower values like for instance 0.05 or less. Want to tweak further the deformations. Okay, so, but that needs much more clicks. So I'm clicking a lot of times now to add the weights or the points here to be affected by the forearm joint. You can see now that each time I click, I add a 0.05 skin weight to this for our joint. Okay, So I think you get the idea now of how the add operation work, right? Great. Fantastic. This serves as a really good method to tweak and to smooth out areas where we have the harsh or rough deformations, right? Great. And you can still use this smooth option here to smooth out areas. You can see that the value has disappeared. The smooth operation here is kind of automatic. So when you start painting over certain points using the smooth Maya, we'll go ahead and smooth that area. You can see we have some rough skin weights here. So if I start painting, you can see that we are getting a lot more smoother effects, but this is not always recommended. Why? Because you don't know actually where those skin weights are going to be distributed. So Maya will automatically redistribute these weights here. And you actually don't know actually where those are going to be distributed with. Sometimes Maya do a very good job at smoothing areas in giving you much better results in much better deformations. But sometimes Maya redistribute the skin ways to areas that does not need to be influenced, okay, So you have to be careful when using the smooth operation. When I'm working on scaling a model, I start always with the replace method using a value of one. And this will help to block in the weight initially, okay? And this will help to blocking the weights much more quicker. You can see how I'm able to quickly recover some weights here. And after that, after I completely block in that area, I go ahead and start using a combination of the ad and a little bit of small, but carefully, you always have to be careful when using the smooth. Okay? So I'm using the ad instead to add, for example, a just a lower value. We will add that to smooth areas. Okay, so always start with replace and then follow it by the ad to start smoothing areas out. Okay? So like this, you can see how I'm able now to smooth manner. Willie tries to avoid smooth as possible as you can. You can still smooth skin using the ad, okay, So this will give you the option to smooth manually by yourself, by adding influences over the areas that you won't. Okay, So I'm now smoothing areas out. Okay, so depending on your story and your character, for example, this is the hard mesh. So I want this to be not need to be smooth. But in regions like these, in the humanoid regions like the body of our character, this, you would need always to use the Add to smooth out regions. And you can still use the paint or the hammer Skin Weights tool that will do a great job in also smooth areas and give you better results in your skin, right, great. So that's pretty much it for this lesson. I just wanted to talk about these two options here that are very important. But the one that is important here is replaced and the ad. So these are going to be ones that are most going to work with. So that's pretty much it for this lesson. Let's go ahead now and or the next lesson, we will talk about how to save some time skinning the other side of the character and how we can mirror actually, we can just work on a side of the character and paint it and scan it and fix its deformation. And then we will learn how to transform the pace, the corrected paint or the correct scan to the other side using a very nifty tool in Maya. So let's go ahead and do that next. 27. 26 Mirroing Skin Weights: Now it's time to mirror our skin weights. Okay, so I have gone ahead between lessons and spend a little bit more time refining and editing the deformations around areas like the thigh for example. You can see that I have managed to tweak and refine these areas and smooth things out. Okay, so now everything looks beautiful around the shoulders as well. I have done the same thing. I have gone ahead and use the same techniques we discuss so far to remove some unwanted deformations and to smooth things out. You can see now everything looks nice and clean. Race. And now let's see how we can transfer the skin ways from the left side over to the right side, okay? Because by doing that automatically, we can save a little bit of time. Okay? Because still go ahead and use the same tools that we were using to correct the deformations. You can still go ahead and use that manually for the right side. But there can be a little bit tedious because you are going to start over again and do the same for the other side. And sometimes you don't quite get the same results as the previous or the first side. Alright, so let me show you now the difference between the left and the right side. You can see that we have now the left side which is corrected. Everything looks great in the left side. However, if I go to the Windows outliner and if I grab the right leg IK and start to move this around, you can see that we get a little bit of cavemen here and collapsing around the pelvis area. You can see that here as well. So we want to fix that. Again. You can still go ahead and do that manually, but let's save some time using a really neat tool in Maya called the Mirror Skin Weights tool, right? So this is very easy to use. It's a little bit similar to the mirror Joints tool we were using in a previous lesson. So let's go ahead and discover their first. We're going to select our mesh, mesh that we skin too. And we will go to under the skin menu and we'll grab the mirror skin weights. And we will use or gram is option from here. Okay, so you can see that the settings are quite similar to the settings of the mirror joints tool that we have been using to mirror joints across. We will be mirroring across the YZ plane, like we discussed in the lesson, where we have mirror the joints crossed the right side. So we were using the YZ plane. And here also, we will still use that. The direction, we will use the positive to negative. So here we have the positive x, which is located here in the left side, and the negative X is right here. It is at the right side of the character. So we want to transform from the left side from the positive x over to the negative x, which is the right side. So we will leave the direction positive to negative checked. And we have the surface Association. And I find that the closest point on surface option is the one which gives us an accurate result. So by selecting the first one here, you can go ahead actually and play around with the other options. But I find that the closest point on the surface option is the one that works well in most cases. And so we will be using the first option. Now the influence association one, the association to by default is looks like something like this. So if I go ahead and reset the settings, you can see that the closest joint is the first one. However, I will select one-to-one. Because by selecting this one-to-one, Maya, we'll go ahead and actually look at the hierarchy is on the left side. Try to copy the information of each joint and each hierarchy joint, okay, and each joint relation. And we'll copy that and try to figure out on the right side how to copy that across. Okay, So it will try to mirror one by one each. 28. 27 Building the Global Animation Control: Okay, so finally we will get into creating some animation controls. All right, so the animation controls that we will be building in this course will serve as animation control. So those are the ones that we will grab and use to animate. We will not animate directly on top of the bone objects. This is because we want the bone objects to me as clean as possible. Ok, and you'll see why later. So one of the main reasons to keep the bone objects clean is that sometimes we want to bake the animation directly in the bone objects. So this will keep by animating over the controls and leaving the bone objects cleaned will help us to read the animation of each bone objects more clearly and we will be able to understand what's happening in the scene and how objects are moving and rotating, right? So that's one of the reasons why we will be using control objects. Also, control objects are going to be visible and big and we'll cover the model so they are going to be easy to grab and use. Okay, So sometimes the bone objects are not as easy as they seem to grab and use. So the animation controls are going to be very big and visible so that we can grab them easily and start using them to animate the character much more easily. Okay, so let's go ahead now and start building our first animation controls. This is going to be one of the most important. Controls, actually is going to be the global control. This one will help us to resize the character and oriented however we want and also move it across the scene. Okay? Everything else or every animation controls will be parented underneath this global control and we'll follow it. All right? So one of the techniques that we can use to build control objects is why using curves. Okay? So we'll be using curves to build a square shape here. So what we are going to do is go ahead. Under the Create tab here, we will grab the nerves and we are going to be using either square or circle. So we can use that here as a global control. Or if you want to customize your shape a little bit more, we can go ahead and from the Create tab again, we can score a little bit down until we find this curve tools. And we can grab the CV curve tool and let's grab that from his option. Okay, so here in this case we want to use a linear curve. So it is going to be a square. That is why we have selected this linear. So we get a linear curve. And what's we'll be doing now is let's hide the model for a bit to see the grid. And we will recreating and snapping the points of our shape right to the grid. And so to be able to snap to the grid, Let's hold the X key and Clegg. We can see that we have been able to put or to snap the first of our shape. Let's click again by holding the x key. Okay, so still hold the X key and click again, and it will look like again the third points, the fourth. And we will finish by returning, by clicking on the first here. Now we will hit the Enter key and Maya will give us this beautiful shape that we can work with. Okay, so the first thing that we are going to do is rename this to Anim, underscore global 0, 1. So we know that this is the global control and the prefix is self-explanatory. This will give us a hint that this object here is going to be used to animate, right, Super Core. If we grab now the model, you can see that the control objects is small. So let's use the R key design, the archaea, we'll grab the scale tool and let's scale this a bit. So something similar to this. Just enough so that we can easily grab it. Okay, great. And what we can do is if you want to, you can go ahead and rotate this 45 degrees in the y-axis. Okay? Something similar to this. So we know a little bit about the right side and left side. It's a little bit like a campus, if you think of it this way. So it can give us a little bit of a hint into the direction of the character. But if you don't want to do that, you can still go ahead and Keep it like it was before. But I'm gonna go ahead and leave it like that because I find it's looking really good. Now what we can do at this point is you can see that the control object here is receiving some messy values. So we want to clean that up. And you'll know how to clean that up is by selecting the object and go to the modify, freeze transformations. This will go ahead and reset the objects and clean up every unwanted values here. So now you can see that everything now the curve or the shape, looking great and super clean. Okay, this looks great. Now what we need to do at this point is go ahead. Under the outliner. You can see now we have this animation, global control. What we can do is still from the previous lessons, these two IKEA's here. Let me go ahead and we can see that we have some animation still here. Let's go ahead and right-click and break the connections to eliminate the keys or the Animation keys. Also hear from the left leg. Okay, I will go ahead and highlight the Translate fields and break connections, clean everything up. And you can see that these two IKEA's here needs to go underneath this IK is group. Okay to remain a little bit organized. And what we can do is actually grab the IKEA's group and also the skeleton group and parent those by holding the middle mouse button and drag under the animation group. Okay, So now if we test this out, the parents objects is now, is now this animation group. We start to scale this, right? Take a look. We are now able to scale our character. If we start rotating this around, you can see where are able to rotate and orient our character. And if we want to move this round, we can still do so without any problems and everything is following just nicely, right, great. Now one thing you will notice is that I didn't actually parent this geometry. We group here underneath this animation group. And the reason why I have done this is let's say that I have gone ahead and done this. We will get a problem here. We've got something called double transformations. Let me show you that effect. So if I have gone ahead and parent this model group underneath the animation group, we will get a double transformation effects if we start now moving our animation global control. Take a look what's going to happen. Okay, you can see that we are getting actually double transformations. And that's happening mainly because we have originally skinned our character to the bones and now we are also moving the character. So the character now is moving twice, is moving by the effects of the skin deformation. And we also controlling it by this animation global control here. And so that is what's given us. This double transformation effects. The 3D model now is controlled twice. It is controlled by the animation, global control and is also being driven by the skin. Okay, and that's what's given us this double transformation facts. So I hope you understand now why we need to keep this group here, the smuggle group out of the animation global. Okay? So the animation global needs to control just the skeleton. And by controlling the skeleton, we actually control the model since the model has been skinned to the skeleton. Okay, and also we need the IKEA's group to be underneath the animation global, so it follows nicely. Okay, now you can see that everything is working just as expected and nicely, right? If we start rotating this around, it looks great. And also if we start to scale, all right, this looks fantastic, super cool. So that's pretty much it for this lesson, we have learned how to build our first animation controls, which is the global control. Let's move on to the upcoming lessons and continue building animation controls for our character. 29. 28 Building the Pelvis Control: Now let's move on and create a pelvis control. So the process is going to be the same as we did before with the global control. So we are going to go to the Create tab here. And under the curve tools, we will grab the CV curve tool. Let's grab its option here and make sure that one linear is selected because we want to create a linear curve, right? Rate. Now let's hide the model for a bit to see where who are going to be creating our control. And by holding the x key, we will create our shape and snap it right to the grid. And when we finish, we hit the Enter key. All right, great. Now we have our shape created. Great. Let's give this a name. This will be given a name of Anim underscore pelvis 0, 1. Great. Let's now bring our model back and we want to scale this little bit up. The next thing we will go ahead and do is snap this right to the pelvis bone. Okay? So an easy way to do this is by making sure that our model is stored under a layer here. This layer here serves also as a way to reference or templates our model. So what I mean by that is, for instance, if you want to lock our model so that we don't accidentally selected, we can just hit this button and this will turn into a T. This will tell you that now the model is templated, so we are not able to select it anymore. And so in this case, this will be very handy. So now we are able to snap our control here much easily to the pelvis bone. So let's hold down the V key middle mouse button. Of course, let's switch to the move manipulator first, hit the V key and snap to the pelvis bone, right? Great. Fantastic. We have another option here. If you click on the T button here, it will turn into an R. This means that we are in the reference mode. The reference mode will show you the model. However, you will not be able to select it. However, the template mode will give you just a wireframe of the model and also you will not be able to select it. So you have these options here. I will go ahead and leave it as a reference to see the model, but we cannot accidentally selected, which is going to be handy in our case. Okay, now with our model still selected, let's hit the R key and start resizing this bit down. Okay, So something similar to this rate. This was serving now as a pelvis can show. And now let's go ahead to the Modify tab and freeze transformations. So we clean up a little bit our transformation channels. Now you can see everything is zeroed out and clean. Now this is the starting point of our control. Okay, great. Now from here what we can do is go ahead and constrain the orientation of this pelvis bone to the pelvis control. And the way we can do that is by selecting our control first as a height again, our model to grab the pelvis bone and then shift select the bone or the pelvis bone. And we will go ahead under the constrain, we will grab the Orient Constraint. Let's grab it from its option box here. Let's go ahead and reset the settings. And now if we ran our model back, and if we select the Add or applied, we will notice that this is what we get. Not so cool actually, but this is not looking as we expected. And that's totally fine because let me undo back by hitting the control z. The reason why that happened is because we have the orientation of the pelvis control is totally different from the orientation of the pelvis bone. You can see that we have completely different orientation of each object here. So the pelvis control its orientation is totally different from the pelvis or the orientation of the pelvis bone. And that's why we got that issue when we have constrained those two objects together. So the way to fix this, you have many ways, but as a beginner, you have a very easy option to use to fix this. You can just grab the first control and grab the objects that you want to be constrained. And let's go against the Orient option here. And we will be using this maintain offset option. So if we check that Maya, we'll go ahead and remember the position of the both objects. And we'll give you a constraint with a maintained offset. So now if we click on the ad and if we grab our model, look, take a look. Nothing happened. All right, so now everything, if we start rotating this around, everything is following just nicely. Let me go ahead and undo that and repeat process so you can easily see how to do it. So first we grab the control objects, our pelvis control here in this case. And then we will grab the pelvis bone. This is the objects that will be constrained to follow the orientation of the pelvis. So we select that next, and then we'll go to the constraint menu and select the Orient option here and grab is from its option box. And we make sure that the maintain offset is turned on. So the maintain offset, by enabling the Maya, we'll go ahead and remember the offset between the two objects. So we have completely to orientation of both objects. So Maya will take into consideration that and it's will maintain that difference and that offset. All right, so now if we go ahead and click the Add button, take a look. We have no issues at all. Everything looks super cool. And if we start to rotate our pelvis control around, everything is following just nicely, right? Great. So everything is behaving great. And things looks super cool, right? So that's pretty much it for the pelvis control. In this lesson, we have created a pelvis control for our model. Let's go ahead and repeat the same process and create in the next lesson a control that will drive this back bone here. So let's go ahead and do that next. 30. 29 Building Back Control: Okay, let's create a bad control for our character. So the process is going to be fairly straightforward. We are going to do the same as we did for the pelvis control. So let's go ahead and grab the CV curves tool from the Create menu under the curve tools, we will grab the CV curve two, and let's make sure the one linear is selected. Let's hide our model for a bit, and let's start creating our tour of shape. So let's hold the X key while creating our points so that we can snap to the grid. Let's hit the Enter key when we finish. Alright, great. Very cool. Let's bring our model here. Let's hold the V key while using the Move tool and middle mouse button. Let's turn the layer of our model into the template mode so we can be able to snap to our backbone here, okay, Now we are able to snap to the backbone. Okay, great. Let's select the back control now and hit the R key and start scaling this up a bit, right? Let's now reference our model. All right, great. I feel that this shape here can go a little bit up, but if we start to move this around, you can see the pivot go up as well. And so we don't want that. We want the pivot of the control shape to be exactly at the position of the backbone pivot k. So let's undo back and we have another option to use is by hearing the f 8, the F8 will actually toggle or enter into the component mode. It is like right-clicking on an object and choosing, for example, here the options, the control vertex or the other options. But this is a shortcut. So we can select or grab an object and use the F8. And that will also enter into the components mode. Okay, so now we are able to select the components of our shape here. And what we can do is actually grab all the vertices that construct the objects or our shape here. And let's start moving those up. Okay? Now at first glance, it might seem that we are actually moving the pivot with it as well, but this is not the case. We are just moving the CVs or the points here. And if we now get out of the components mode by hearing again the F8 button, you can see that here's the pivot of that control shape. It has remained it the first position where the backbone pivot was. And so what has moved is just these points here. So we have just grabbed the points and move those up without affecting the pelvis points. And that's why the components mode in these cases is going to be very handy. Okay? So again, if you want to adjust the shape of your controls here without affecting their pivot points, you need to go under the components mode and then customize your shape and reposition the vertices as you want. And when you finish, you will notice that the pivot point didn't change its position. Okay, so great. So this is a technique here that you can use. Now you can see that the control is looking great. All right, Nice. Very cool. Let's give this a name and we will have this we named to Anim, underscore back 0, 1. All right, fantastic. Now let's have our back bone here constrained to our new animation control. But before we do so you can see that we still have some messy values here and we know how to fix those. So I grabbing our control objects, Let's go under the Modify menu and sues the freeze transformations. And this will clean up your control. Okay, so now this is the stalling points of the model. Everything looks nice and clean. And at this point here, we will grab our backbone. And the first thing that will grab is the backbone again. Next we will grab the objects that will be the parents, or that will control the orientation of the backbone, which is this new back control here we just created. And we will go to the Constrain menu and choose the Orient Constraint Option, grab it from its option box. Let's make sure that they maintain offset is selected. So Maya will know how to maintain the difference between the two objects in terms of orientation. Because in the last lesson, I told you that the bone objects and the control objects have a two different orientation. So if we don't use this maintain offset if we hit the apply key. Okay, so this is not good and this is not what we want, right? So let's undo back. And again, this happens because maya tries to match the orientation of the bone to the orientation of the controller here, which have different orientation. And so this is what gives us this kind of effect, which is not a factor we are looking for. So let's hit Control Z to undo back. And let's select our parents or the controller that we want to be the parents, the one that will control or drive the orientation of the bone here. And next we'll select the child or the objects to be constrained to, which is the backbone and less make sure that maintain offset this time is on. If we click on the ad, you can see that everything is now functioning correctly. If we start moving this around, you can see that everything is looking wonderful and following just nicely without any issues, right? This looks great. If we select the previous pelvis, control and start moving this around, everything is looking great. Okay, so now we have managed to create a back controller for our character. It looks fantastic. Let's move on. And in the next lesson we will create another controller. And this time this controller would drive this chest bone here. And we will learn another cool technique that we can use to create some beautiful shapes to use as animation controls. 31. 30 Building a Chest Control: All right, great. Now it's time to create a chess control for our character. So the way I'm gonna do this in this lesson here is a different way. So I will show you a different way to create an animation control, and that is by tracing over a polygonal objects. So this way, you will have a different shape that you can use to animate your character. So here's how it works. The first thing then I will go ahead and do is go over to the Create tab here and grab under the polygon primitives, I will grab a cube shape. Can see that Maya have gone ahead and created this cube shape here, it is kind of small. So I will go ahead and press the R key and start scaling this up. Okay, It's so great. Let's move this forward a bit so we can easily trace over without interfering with the character model. Now at this point here, what we'll go ahead and do is turn off the wireframe on shaded so that we can easily see our new points and lines that we will be creating. So now we can do is go over against the Create tab and grab the CV curves tool from the Curve Tools menu here, let's make sure that the linear option is selected. And we will hold the V key while creating this, these lines here or these points so that we can be able to snap over the vertices of the cube shape. Okay? So something like this, right? Rate. Let's continue creating our shape. Coup. Always hold the V key while creating so that you can be able to snap over diversities of your polygonal object or ice, so something like this. So let's now hit the Enter key. And if we now delete our cube, you can see the shape that we were able to get. There is a very cool shape that we can use as a chess can show less now go to the display or actually modify, and we will center the pivot so that the pivot is now centered around this control object here. Let's rotate this around the y-axis 90 degrees so that it flips around. Okay, cool. And now what we can do is go ahead and hide our Mega Man layer and also use the V key to snap and middle mouse button to snap to the chess control. All right, great. Let's bring back the model. And now what we can do is scale down this shape a little bit down. Okay, so something like this. Let's also minimize its height a bit, right? Rate. Kind of cool. What we can do actually is go to the components mode and grab the vertices of our shape here and move those up. Okay, so something like this. Right? We can start reshaping this object here a bit. You can hold this up a bit. Let's select these that points. This one here as well, and move those in. Right? Rate is select these bottom ones and move those it down. So I'm a little bit too reshaping this shape here to give me a little bit of a hints about the direction of the character. Okay, so something like this, right? We can select those points and scale those in. Okay, Great. Cool. Let's grab the top vertices. Let's move those up. Right? This looks fantastic, right? Let's grab these and try to widen a bit the shape. Okay. Thanks. So this looks fantastic now, I'm really happy with the shape. Okay, so now we can press the phase again to switch or to toggle the component mode off. And now what we can do is make sure that the pivot point of this new chest control is right at the pivot point of the chest bone, which is exactly what we have here. Both have the same position. And now what we can do is go ahead and under the Modify as freeze the transformations. So we clean up our shape a little bit. Let's have this renamed to Anim, underscore chests 0, 1. All right, cool. This looks fantastic. At this point here, you know the process. We are going to select our shape here and constrain the chest bone to this newly created shape. So the first shape that we will select is of course the parent, the driver, which will drive the chest bone. So we select that, the animation chest control. And next we will select the chess though. Let's go ahead to the constrain. And under the constraint menu, we will select the Orient Constraint option unless make sure maintain offset is on and we'll press Add, Right the rates. If we start now rotating our new chest control around. All right, Take a look. We're able now to control the chests of our character. Very cool. Let's test the order controls, right? Everything's following just nicely. All right, this looks beautiful. In this lesson, we have discovered a new way to create an animation controls. Let's move on to the next lesson and we will be creating a center of gravity control, which will control the entire upper body of our character. 32. 31 Building a Center of Gravity Control: Let's now create a center of gravity control for our character. So the center of gravity control will be responsible of controlling the entire upper body of our character. So if we start moving them around, we'll be able to adjust the entire portion of the body all at once. So let's go ahead and start creating that. I will be using another shape here to create the center of gravity. This will be EC, blocked shape. The way I will go ahead and do that is by switching over to the front view. And let's use the grid to actually create that. So let's go ahead to the Create menu and grab the CV curve to always make sure that the linear option is selected. And let's use the x key to snap to the grid, right? Great. So as you can see now, I'm creating a blood C-shape by snapping to the grid. And once I finish, I hit the Enter key. See now the new shape is a C shape. Let's have is renamed to any underscore C, O G 0, 1, right, Cool. Let's now go to the Modify and center the pivots around this object. Let's now go to the perspective view. Here's our new shape. Okay, great. Let's now go in and template our Mega Man layer here to be able to snatch the bone objects and just the bones. So let's V and snap over CD, pelvis or the root. Either one of those will be fine. Unless go to the component mode and grab the CVs and move those to the back so that we can easily select our new shape here. Let's grab the points here and scale those up. Right? Great. This looks fantastic. And always, as you do this and as you change and customize your shapes in the component mode, if you now toggle or get out of the component mode, you can see that the pivot remained in the original position. So the pivot point didn't change. And we just reshaped our CVs without affecting the pivot point, which is always a good thing in rigging, right? Great. Let's now bring our model back. Right? This looks fantastic. Coo. At this point here, or it can do is go ahead and under the modifier, let's freeze transformation to clean up the control a little bit. It looks fantastic. And what we can do now is go ahead and set up some constraint. So the way the center of gravity works is that we are going to constrain the movement, the position, and also the rotation of the root joint to the center of gravity. So let's go ahead and do that. So we'll select the center of gravity first, the parent, and then we'll select the child or the objects that will be constrained, which is going to be the root. And we will go ahead. And under the constraint, this sign, we will select the parent constraint. Let's grab its option and reset its settings. You can see that by default the maintain offset is on. So the parent constraint will lock the position and also the rotation of an object to another parent objects. So if we now choose the Add button, now, by moving this control, the COG or the center of gravity you can show, You can see that we are able to adjust the root of our objects. Can see that since the order bone objects, the bat and the chess have already been lakhs to the, to their respective controls. You can see that by moving just the center of gravity, they are locked in orientation. Okay? Okay, so great. Now at this point here, what we are going to do is go in and create a hierarchy for these control objects. So the chess control, we need to go underneath the back, okay, you can leave those as they are now, but I feel that the chess objects or the chest control here needs to go under the back control. So we'll select the chest control first, then the back Control and press the P key to parent those. You can see now that by parenting those together, you can see that the back control now is driving the chess with it. And if we now select both, you can see that if we start rotating those around both together, you can see that we're able to get some nice curvature and bend in the upper body of our character. She is looking great. All right, Great. And let's now select the back control as well as the pelvis control. And we will parent those under the center of gravity. So let's hit the P key. And now if we start moving and rotating our center of gravity, you can see that now we're able to drive the entire upper portion of the body of our character, right? This looks fantastic. Let's check and see how the movement is going to work. Okay, so you can see now we're able to get some nice movement from the COG. Is looks great. Our make him and character is happy to see that. Is actually very happy. He's showing us that, right, is dancing as rotate those round or the new center of gravity control. And now you can see that we are driving the upper portion body of our character. And every other control is still working wonderfully, right? Great. The covers is also working great. So that's pretty much it. In this lesson, we have gone ahead and created the center of gravity control, which is responsible for driving the upper section of the body of our character. Let's now move on to the next lessons and we will create controls for the neck, as well as the head of our character. 33. 32 Creating A Repository of Control Shapes: I feel that it will be a good idea to discuss a really handy way to actually create some animation controls in a repository of controls. And each time you want to create an animation control, you're just import that prebuilt shape so you don't need to rebuild the shape each time you want an animation control. So let me show you how to do that. Let's say, for example, that you want to create or trace over the cube shape here, Let's have this, resize a bit up and bring that to the front here. We can trace over it easily. Let's say that we are going to use this 3D shape to trace over and create a custom animation control, just like we did in the previous lessons. Okay, so let's grab the CV curves tool and let's turn the wireframe on, shaded off so we can easily trace over r cubed. Let's hold the V key and start tracing over our cube. Don't worry if the lines overlap, that's totally fine. Okay. Rate. Nice. So I will continue tracing over the shape here. Wonderful. All right. This looks great. Let's hit the Enter key now to finish the creation process. And let's say we delete our cube. So we are now left with just our control shape here. All right, this is going to be, for example, a control objects that we will be using quite often in our rigging process. So let's have this or its pivot point centered by going into the Modify and center pivot, right? Right. This looks beautiful. And we can have this rename two and in control, for example, alright, rate. So let's say now that each time you won't this object here, you can either rebuild each time this objects from scratch, which is kind of tedious. So I better approach to do this is by storing this object or this model here in a repository of controls. So that each time you want something like this, you can just import that object in and use it in your rigging process. All right, so the way to do this is by selecting the shape here. And we can go to the File menu here and Export Selection. Okay, let's grab from its option box. Then let's export our selection. Now maya will give you a directory that you want to save this objects in. And let's say we save this in a, the assets folder here under the Maya project files folder. So let's have this here and let's call it any control. For example, unless export our selection, right, this looks cool. Now, let's say now we delete this shape here. Okay, So what we can do now is just grab that objects and start using it without spending any more time creating from scratch. So if we now go to the files and import, and now we are under the assets folder in my as project files folder. Let's see, we grab this animation control here we just exported and let's say that we want to import that. And right away you can see here's our shape ready to use. You can have this renamed to whatever you want. Let's say that we want to have this, for example, control the head. So we want to rename this to anime head. And we can template our model. And let's say that we snap this to the head bone of our character, right rate. Let's say we scale this down. And we can enter the components mode and start working with this however we want. So we did the hard way once and now we can benefit from using that prebuilt objects we just exported. And it is going to be always ready to use whenever you want it. Okay? So this is a cool way to effectively regular characters and it can save you quite a bit of time whenever you want to create some animation controls for your characters. 34. 33 Rigging the Head: Let's now set up a head control for our character. So the way I'm going to do this is by using the technique that we discussed in the last lesson. So I have already created a custom shape to be the animation control for the head. And so I will go ahead and import that by heading to the File menu and import. And I will go under the assets folder in the project files folder in Maya. You will also be able to find this shape here if you want to use that under the assets. So I will grab the Anim underscore heads 01. Let's import that. You can see here is the shape that I will be using as the head control. So you can see that Maya have gone ahead and rename this. So I will delete the suffix here, leaving just any underscore had 01. All right, great. Super cool. What I can do now is you can see that this is a custom shape. Let's have this snap to the pivot point of our head bone. So let's hide our model for a bit. And let's hold the V key and snap to the head bone. Now, here's the thing. Let's say, for example, that this is the object that you want to snap. But you can see that an axis here is highlighter yellow. This means that this x-axis here is locked down. So let's say that this is the axis that it is locked down now. And if I go ahead and v snap this to the bone or to the head bone, you can see that yes, it is kind of snap but just in the x axis. Okay. So the control objects just snap to the head bone? Yes. But just in the X axis. And that's because we have this x-axis here highlighted or selected. In other words, so whenever you see an axis highlighted yellow, it means that it is selected. And if we snap by holding the V and we already have an axis selected, it will just snap in the direction of that axis. So if we want the default behavior, which is snapping in all direction, you just need to click on the center on this square here to refresh the selection. And now you can see that the center gizmo is selected. And that means that we can snap in all the direction. So now if we go ahead and use the V key and snap to the head bone, you can see that? Yes, now we are able to snap to the head bone without any issues. Okay, great. So now let's bring our model back and less go into the components mode. Let's grab the points of our shape here. And let's grab those up to make it easier for the enemy there is to select this control here. And let's scale this down a bit. Let's grab this down, right? Great, this looks fantastic. Okay, cool. I like this arrow shape here because it's shows you the direction where the model is facing. All right, great. Let's now get out of the component mode by hitting the FAC again. And let's clean our shape a little bit by heading over to the Modify and freeze transformations k. Now we have a clean shape to work with. What we can do now is let's go ahead and constrain, orient our head bone to that new created shape here. Alright, so let's have our control or head control first selected. And the next thing to select is our head bone. Let's go to the rigging menu and let's go under the constraint. Let's select the Orient Constraint option and let's make sure maintain offset is selected. Then let's click Add. All right, cool. Now let's test this out. If we start moving our control, right, great, Check this out. The head of our Mega Man character is moving just fine, right? Super cool. Very nice. All right, so this is going to be pretty much it for this lesson. We built a head control for our model. This looks fantastic. Let's now move on to the next lesson and let's make sure to build a neck control is going to be kind of tricky for this character here. And that's why we are going to create a somewhere right here. We will use an arc shape to be responsible for controlling the neck of our character. So let's go ahead and do that next. 35. 34 Creating Animation Control for the Neck: Let's now move on and create an animation controller for the neck. All right, Great. So the way I'm going to do this, this time is a little bit different, since I will be using a different tool to create that 2D shape we will be using. So let's go to the Create tab design and we will select under the curve tools. This time we will select the two points, circular arc. Let's click on the square to grab this option box. And let's switch over to the top view, right? Great. I'm going to be using this tool here to create a kind of arc shape, to be like a Koehler, to control the neck of our character. So the way this tool here works is by first, let's put the first here and let's make sure that we're holding the X key to be able to snap to the intersections of the grid. So let's plug in the first. And once I start putting the second, this will determine how the arc is getting created, right? This looks fantastic. And what we can do is why still creating this, you can actually click on this point here to inverse the way or the direction of your arc. And you can use this point here to determine the radius of your arc, right? Great. And you can still move the points that you have created around to adjust the way the arc looks, right? This looks great. I think this is looking pretty good. So let's hit the Enter key to finish the creation process. And what I can do now is let's head over to the perspective view. It can see that we have the pivot point, right there are the center. So let's grab our new objects here. And let's have this snap to the neck bone. Let's hide our model. Let's V snap. Let's make sure that the center of the gizmo is selected so we don't accidentally just snap in one axis. We discussed that in the previous lesson. So always be careful, make sure that the center of the gizmo is selected. And once you have that selected, let's go ahead and snap to the neck. Well, this looks great. Pretty good. Let's bring our model back to see now, our shape here is covering the model. So it's up to you. We can leave this as it is, or we can adjust that a little bit more to be easier to select. So let's go into the components mode is grab the vertices that make our shape and less. Pull those back a bit and scale those down. Something like this. Let's bring those forward. And we can scale this in the x-axis and bits up, something like this, right? Let's have this bit scale down. I have chosen this shape here. It resembles a little bit a color. And that way, the animator, when he sees the shape here, he knows that this is going to be the neck control. All right, Let's go now to the object mode and let's have this renamed. So let's select that and had this renamed to Anim underscore neck. Okay, to give the animator more information about this control here and what it is going to be controlling, right? Great. Let's now freeze transforms unless switch to the move tool and see where the pivot points of that object is. And it is actually right at the center of the neck bone, which is what we want, right? This looks fantastic. And now what is left to do is just constrain the neck bone of our character to this newly created nick animation control. So let's grab for as the animation neck control. Let's next grab the neck bone. Let's head over to the constraint menu and choose the Orient Constraint option. Let's make sure we maintain offset is selected. Let's hit the apply and close. And if we now grab the neck and emission control and you can see now we're able to control and animate the head of our character. The head is locked down by the head control. So if we start moving that around, you can see that the head control is controlling the head bone. And what I can do now is go ahead and less have this head control parented underneath the neck control by hitting the P key. And now if we start moving our neck, animation can show, you can see that the head controlling also following just five. And if we start rotating our head control, the head now is moving also independently of course, of the neck, which is kind of cool, right? Rate. One thing left to do here is let's have this neck Animation Control S have that parents said under the chess control so that when we start moving the chests can show everything. The head and the neck controls will just follow as they showed and everything is following nicely. All right, this looks fantastic. This is so fun. All right, super cool. So that's pretty much it for this lesson, we have learned how to use the two points circular arc option here to create an arc shape here, to use as the neck control. Let's now move on to the next lesson and we will start working and rigging the arms of our character. 36. 35 Rigging the Clavicles: Alright, let's now start creating some clavicle controls for our character, right? So I will go ahead and use the same techniques we were using in the last lessons. So under the Create menu, I will grab the CV curve tool. And this time I will create a different shape. It is actually going to be a triangular shape. So I will hold the X key while creating the points to snap to the grid intersections. And once I finish, I hit the Enter key. Let's now switch to the perspective view. And let's center the pivot of our new shape. Okay? And the next thing that we will do is go ahead and snap our new control to the clavicle bell. So let's hide the model for a moment, and let's hold the V key and snap to the left clavicle. And let's use the component mode. Mice had the F8 to enter the component mode. And let's grab the CVs are new shape. Of course, let's bring back our model. And with our CVs still selected my smooth those out. And let's scale those down a bit so that we can easily select those, right? Let's move those in a bit, right? So something like this. Let's now hit the phase again to get out of the component mode. And let's have this renamed to any underscore L, underscore clavicle, 0, 1. Right? It's super cool with this control still selected. Let's freeze transformations to clean it a little bit up. And the next thing that I will do is go ahead and mirror this new objects cross to the other side. Now here's a great technique that you can use. So the first thing that I will go ahead and do is grab the outliner. And you can see that we have our clavicle animation control selected. And with that still selected, let's hit D, can show D. Okay, you can see that we now have a clavicle 0 2, which indicates that this is a duplicate objects. And now with our duplicates object selected, we will go ahead and create a group for that. Let me show you why we are going to create that group. If we now hit the Control G, maya will go ahead and create a group for that duplicate objects. And at the same time, it will place its pivot right at the center or the origin of space, which is exactly what we want since we want to mirror grass, the origin to the other side. And so we will use that group if we now go ahead and select that group. And in the scale axis, if we type in minus1, take a look at what's going to happen immediately. You can see that Maya have flipped that new group we just created using that pivot point right at the center of the origin, which is what's given us this nice positioned control here. So it says exactly positioned in the right position, in the right side, right? And now what we can do is with the new group still selected, let's go into the Edit menu and let's hit the Ungroup. And Maya, we'll go ahead and delete that. We'll put just created, leaving us with just this beautiful mirror shaped here. At this point, we can have this renamed to any underscore, underscore clavicle 0, 1. Now let's have this clean a little bit up by going into the Modify and freeze this transformation. And if we now take a look at our new control shapes, you can see that they are looking beautiful. Everything is looking wonderful. We have created a nice mirrored shape using the grouping technique at this point here we can just go in and create some constraint. So we will select the left clavicle control and select the left clavicle bone and you know what to do. Now, we can go into the constraint menu and select the Orient Constraint option IS make sure maintain offset is selected. And let's choose the apply. Now the difference between apply and add, you will see that in a bit. If we now check or click on the Apply Maya, we'll go ahead and apply the Orient Constraint without closing this window, which is exactly what we want here, since we want to still go ahead and apply the constraint for the other signs solo select the right clavicle control, and then we will select the right clavicle bone. And this sign, if we select the Add, Maya will apply that constraint and close out the window. All right, Now let's check this out. Let's do a little bit of his tests. If we start rotating now, our new clavicle control, right? This looks fantastic, great. Let's check the other control in the other side, right? This looks wonderful. Everything is working wonderfully. Now we can take our new clavicle controls and let's have those parented under the chests control by hitting the peaky. And if we now start rotating our chess control, right? Take a look. Everything is following nicely, right? Great, fantastic. At this point here we can a little bit of a cleanup work in terms of visibility and in terms of optimization. For example, we can have the controls, the left side, colored differently from the ones on the right side. Let me show you how to do that. For example, if we select our new clavicle control and if we hit the Control a to grab the attribute editor, let me go in. If we go to the clavicle, the first tab, and if we go to the display, an under display section here, if we choose the drawing overrides, you can enable the overprice end. We can choose a color from here. So for example, I will go ahead and choose to work with the blue colors on the left side, you can see now our control has been colored to flow. And the right side, I will go ahead and enable overrides. Again, makes sure that you are in the first, at the first tab. And let's go to the Display section here and make sure that under the drawing overrides you enable the oversize. And from here we can select from the slider here you can select the color that you want. I will go ahead and work with a red color here on the right side. All right, this looks fantastic. Now you can differentiate between the controls that are located on the left side and the ones that are located in the right side. Right. Beautiful. Okay, so our rig will be finished very soon. Let's start this lesson now here, and let's move on to the next lesson and continue rigging the arm. 37. 36 Setting Up Elbow Controls: Let's go ahead now and add an elbow control. All right, so the elbow can show will be responsible for controlling the twists of our arm. So let me show you how that works. If we go to the outliner and grab the left IK handle of the left arm here. If we scroll a bit down until we find this twist channel here. And if we start adjusting that by middle mouse dragging and holding the Control key, you can see the effect that we get. So this is the twists that we want to give the animator the ability to control using an animation control. Okay? So you can see that it is kind of tedious to go all the way to the IK and then search for the twist and then start adjusting it from here. So this is not very effective. So the other approach that we will be using is creating a separate control. That we will use a separate or a new constraint, which is the pole vector. This one here is going to can show that twists by adjusting or sliding the control position here. Alright, so let me show you how that works. Hit the Control Z a few times to go back. And now let's go ahead and create our control. So we are not going to rebuild that from scratch, Of course. So let's go ahead and import the one that we created in a previous lesson. It is found under the assets folder, unless we have any control. It is a box shape that we trace over a cube 3D model. All right, Let's now go in and snap this by holding the V key and middle mouse. Snap to the left elbow. Okay, Let's shrink this down. Okay, Then let's move this back. Let's continue shrinking this little bit more, right? So something like this. And let's have this one named Anim, underscore L, underscore elbow 001, right, great. Let's freeze transforms by heading over to the Modify and choosing freeze transformations. Right now we have a clean animation control to work with, right? Rate at this point here, let's have this mirrored across to the other side. And we now have to do that. We are going to use the grouping technique we discussed in a previous lesson. So let's go ahead and duplicate this object here by hitting the control D. You can see now we have got a new objects with the suffix of 0, 2. This is going to indicate that this is an duplicate objects. Okay, with that selected, with the duplicate objects selected, let's hit the Control G. You can see now my, I have created a new group with the origin or the pivot point right at the origin of the space, which is what we want, since we want to mirror perfectly to the other side. And we want to mirror across the negative x. So you can see the space here is the positive x, while this is the negative x. So we want to mirror quasi negative x. And so with the group still selected, let's put in a negative one in the scale axis, channel must hit the Enter and boom, you can see we have managed to create a mirrored shape right at the perfect position, right? This flux, beautiful, perfect. Let's now with the new group selected. Let's go in under the Aedes and choose Ungroup. And Maya, we'll go ahead and delete that group we just created. And let's have this new objects renamed to Anim underscore, underscore L, 0, 1. And of course with that still selected, let's freeze transformations. All right, super cool. Beautiful. Let's have these two objects colored differently. So we know the control that controls the left side, from the other that controls the right side. So let's select the left elbow control. And let's go into this first tab here. Let's scroll down to the display section till we find the drawing overrides and less enable the overrides and choose to work with a blue color like we did for the clavicle, the left clavicle here. And let's do the same here. Let's scroll till we find the display section. Under the drone of risers enable the drawing overrides and less work with a red color here. Alright, perfect. It looks beautiful. Now assigned to setup the pole vector constraint. Of course to do that, let's go ahead to the outliner and let's grab our left IK. The first thing that we will grab is of course the driver or the parents, which is the left elbow control. And next we will grab the left IK handle of the arm. And let's go into the constraint menu and choose pole vector constraint. Let's leave the settings as they are. We have just one slider here, so we will hit the Add button and less, test this out. So if we now start sliding this around, you can see that by changing the position of this elbow control here, we are able to actually twist the arm of our character and we are, and we are able to change that to his channel. We have under the IK Handle, which is very handy in this case. Okay? So we don't need to go in under the K channel or under the IK Handle and scroll to find this Swiss channel. Now we have a much easier control to use. We can just grab our control here and start moving this around. And you can see we can easily adjust the twists, right? Beautiful. It's now 0 out. This model to bring it back to the default position. And let's repeat the same thing for the other side. We'll select the right elbow control and the right IK handle for the arm. And let's go to the constraint and pole vector constraint, right? Beautiful. Let's test this out. Perfect. Everything is working wonderfully. How cool is that? Beautiful? All right, so that was pretty much it for this lesson. Let's bring this back to the default position here. We have learned how to create some elbow controls to drive the twists in our IK to a channel for the arms. Let's go in and move on to the next lesson. And we will build a control that will drive the risk as well as the IK handle. So let's go ahead and do that next. 38. 37 Setting Up Wrist Controls: All right, So we are doing a pretty good job. We have managed in the last lesson to create some elbow controls to drive the twist in the arm IK System. All right, great. Let's now go ahead in this lesson and set up some risk controls that will drive the orientation of the risks as well as the IK position. So for that, we will go into use a shape here, this arrow shape. So let me go into the File menu and import that. It is going to be located under the assets folder. So this is the anime head that we created in a previous lesson. So let's move this here. Let's have this oriented in the y-axis. So I'm going to put in a 90 degrees in the y axis. And I'm going to have this renamed to Anim underscore L underscore risks the row one. Perfect. So let me go ahead and position this or snap it to the rest. Pivot points, right? Something like this. I will switch to the components mode and grab this control here. And let's bring the model back so we can see where we position this new control here. So let me select all the vertices and drag those up. Let's shrink the size a bit. Okay, so let me shrink this again, right, great. So something like this. We'll do just fine. Let me hit the phase again to switch back to the object mode. And from here, where I'm going to do is freeze the transformations of our new control to clean it up a bit. And now at this point, what we can do is have this mirror to the other side. We know how to do that. We will use the same grouping techniques. So let's have this duplicated by hitting the control D. And with the new duplicates objects selected, let's hit the Control G. And now with the group selected less, pin a minus1, the x-axis or the scale axis field to have this flip to the other side in the negative x. And now you can see we have the new control right, at the exact position that we want. So let's go to the outliner and thus grab the new group we just created. Then from the Edit menu, let's choose the Ungroup. This will eliminate the new group. And with our new objects selected, let's have this renamed to any underscore, underscore risk 01. And let's clean this up a bit with Freeze Transformations. Right? Now everything looks great. Let's have our left control recolored to the blue shade. And the one on the left. Let's have recolor to the red shade. Alright, perfect. So this looks beautiful. Now at this point here, what just left is go into the outliner and let's grab the driver, which is the left risk control. And then let's grab the left IK handle of the arm. And let's go under the constraint and let's choose the point constraint. The points constraint will allow you to lock the position of a certain objects to as parents. So if we now click the Apply, you will notice that by moving now our new control objects, we are able to drive that IK handle because we have locked as position using the points constraints. So we have lacks the position of our IK handle to the position of our new risks control. Right, super cool. Great. So let's repeat that. In the other side. Let's grab the rights, risks control and the right IK handle for the arm. And let's hit the Add. Let's test this out, right? Great. Now you will notice something here that is that the R or the risks here should not be reoriented as we adjust this control here, we want the orientation of the rest to be locked. Okay? And that's because sometimes we need to animate, for example. The hand, but we want the hand to stay put on something or a handstand. In some cases you want the character to have its hand put without any movements. So if we now start, for example, rotating our chest, you can see that the risks are moving around, which is not exactly what we won't. This is not a good thing, okay? Because if you do so, you have to counter animate this wrist here and start animating it to cancel out that effects. And which is going to give you a lot of headaches. And at the best scenario, you will get a lot of movements in the rest, which is not going to give you good results. So we want to lock the orientation of the wrist bone here to the orientation of our new risks and emission control. So let's go ahead and undo back few times and let me show you how that is done. So we're going to use simply an orient constraint for that to lock the orientation of the risks to the orientation of the new risk control. So with the left animation or worse animation controls selected, let's grab that first. The next thing we'll grab the left wrist bone unless go to the constraint, select the Orient Constraint. Let's leave the maintain offsets checked unless hit the apply. Let's do that here as well. For the other side, grab the rights control, right? Risk control first, then second, we'll grab the right, respond unless hit the add. Right. Now, take a look. If we close out the outline of the window, and now if we start rotating or adjusting the position of our risk control, check this out. The orientation of the hand now is completely locked to the orientation of this new risk control, which is beautiful. Now we can have the character, for example, is hand put on something and we can rotate, for example, the chest. And you can see that the hand will still put without any movement, which is great in this case, since it will not give us a lot of movement that we need to counter animate k. So this is very optimal. We can just use the control here to either reorients our hand or if you want to, you can use the position a to position the entire IK Handle. Same thing here goes for the other side. We now have the possibility to have a handstand and the hand is tilted and we can still reorient it with our new risk control. Okay, great. Now the hand orientations are completely locked to the orientation of these new risks control. All right, beautiful. So our character is saying goodbye, and that is also going to do now, I will say goodbye. But just for this lesson, because I will stop the lesson here. And let's move on to the next lesson. And let's start rigging the fingers. So let's go ahead and do that next. 39. 38 Working with Custom Attributes: So before we move on and continue to regain the fingers, I want to spend a little bit more time to discuss an important topic in Maya that will help you in rigging. And that topic is customizing or adding custom attributes to your control objects. So let's say for instance, that you want to add some new attributes here you can see the original attribute which are located here to translate, rotate, and scale and visibility. Let's say that you want to add more attributes to give the animator more control and more options to animate. So we have that option. Let me show you first how that works. So let's say, for example, that we are going to create a cube. Let's reshape this and resize it a bit up so it's visible. And let's say, for instance, that we want to add a custom channel here, or custom attribute that will control the position or movements cross the x axis. So the way we are going to do this is by adding an attribute, by heading to the Modify tab. And under the attributes section, Let's hit the Add Attribute. Alright, so once you hit that option, you will get this option box here. And from here what you can do is give the new attributes a name which we will call cube, translate, underscore x. So something like that. And for the make attributes here we have either curable display or war or hidden. For the displayable he, you could create an attribute that will be displayable. We cannot set any keyframes on that, and we'll be creating some displayable attributes to organize a little bit the channel box. So I'm going to show you how that works. But for now, we will just gonna go ahead and work with the chemo sense. We will be using the custom channel to animate. And so we can use keys and key that of course, if we want to. Now for the datatype here, we have many options to choose from. The most used one here are going to be the float integer, Boolean, and enter these four options. Here are the ones most often use k. In this case, I'm going to choose the float, since we are going to be controlling the position, the x movements of the cube, which is a float channel. You can see if we start moving or adjusting the Translate X field. Can see that the float, the data of this or the datatype of this translates x is a float. Again, the float is any number with a decimal point, and the integer is any number without decimal points. For the Boolean type here, it is either going to be false or true. So just two values to work with, either true or false. So depending on your scenarios, you may want to create some custom channels selection from just two options, either one or the other. Okay? So this is the Boolean. And for the inner ear is kind of like podium, but with many options. So we can set many options. You can see here the green, blue, you can set up many options, are renamed them as you would like, okay? And you will get those options to choose from. But in our case, we will select the flow since again, we will be using that to control the Translate X R cube and the numeric attribute properties here, the minimum and maximum. You can have that setup to whatever value you feel fits here. But in our case, we are not going to set any lemmas to our control here. So we want the animator to be free to put in any values in either the positive or the negative x. The default is going to be 0 to start from, right. So now let's give this name again. We will call this Q underscore translate x. And let's click on the, Okay. Oops, I have gone ahead and add this silly cube. So let me go back and do this again. Let's select the ending global control. Again, this is just a demonstration tutorial here. I'm not going to add a custom channel to translate the x cubed because this is whom to be meaningless. But of course, the custom channels is going to be very handy sense we will use that and add those to the rest of our control object here to control and drive the fingers, which we are going to be doing in the next lesson. Before we do that, let me show you how the customer channels work. So we will grab the anime global again. Let's head over to the modifying and then select Add. Attribute must have this rename the channel or the attribute that we want to add. Let's have it renamed to cube translates underscore x. We will make sure that mic attributes keywords selected, since we want to keep that. If we want to the datatype, we'll select the float. We don't want any minimum or maximum values set up here and we'll click on the Add. All right, cool. Now, how are we going to set up or connect this cube? Translate X here to the Translate X field of the cube. So how are we going to do that? We have a really nice editor here in Maya that will help us link attributes together one-to-one. And that editor is going to be located under the windows. If we go under the general editors, it is the connection editor, disconnection editor is one of the most important editors to work with in Maya. And as you start learning more on Maya, you will begin understand more about this connection editor. And you will learn that it is very important and you will start using this connection editor more often. So here's how it works. We have two sections here or two columns. The first column here. We will use that to load an object. So we will load the object that will be the parents. And since we want this control here, the Q translate x to drive the x field in the cube. So this is going to be the driver. We will load that here. So we will select the animation global and less. Click on Reload left here. All right, cool. You can see that Maya have gone ahead, they're reloaded. Our parents, our objects here on the left and the driven or the child objects, we will rule load that you're on the right. So like this, okay, perfect. Now we have this button here from two. This will toggle between either direction. So let's say for example, you won't the right side here to control the left. So you will switch that from the, from the, from here. We want the front here to control to the left. In our case, since we want the global which is located here on the left, you can show the cube, will switch that back to from two. Here is the arrow direction. It shows you the direction of the control from left to right. All right, great. Now we have an option here to show non curable by default. It is going to be on for the right and the left as well. So this shown on cable here. We'll go ahead and show you every channel under the objects that you have gone ahead and added to the connection editor. But as you can see, my, I have gone ahead and added so much attributes that have kind of cluttered our view here. So we have many options that are not necessary for our purposes here. We have too many options that we're not going to use. And so for that, let's go to the left display and uncheck, Show non-key of all, to show just the key parameters. And let's do that here for the right side as well. Alright, so fantastic. Now, in this instance here, what we will go ahead and do is very easy, very simple to do. We will select dq translates x field, which we are going to use as a driver. So the cube translates x will drive the Translate X parameter of the x-axis of the queue. And we will look, we will expand the translate channel here of the cube and we'll select the Translate X. And boom, you can see that the Translate X field of the cube has turned yellow, which indicates the yellow color here, indicates that there is a connection setup by Maya. And so you know that there's something here that is controlling this field, which is of course that QC translate x channel we created. All right, so now if we go ahead and close our connection editor window, and if we start now, modify in this parameter here by middle mouse and drag. Take a look. We are able now to adjust the cube translate X field with another field here. So we are able to adjust that translate X without touching the queue, which is really nice. And this will serve many purposes in rigging. Again, we will use that you can show the fingers character by putting or by adding more attributes to the risk control. So we use that to give us more controls and the fingers will use the same technique we used here. How cool is that? So we are able to control the cube with just the parameter that we have added to the global animation control. All right, very cool. And this connection in its nature is one-to-one connection. So the value that you put here is going to be the exact value. You can see here that we have a minus 5.5. If we go ahead and cd translate X field of the cube, it is the same parameter or the same value that is plugged in right here. So this is a one to one connection. The exact value that is going to be plugged here, it is going to be plugged in here as well. All right, fantastic. So that was an introduction to custom channels and customer attributes in Maya. Let's use that to control the fingers of our character. 40. 39 Rigging the Fingers: Let's set up some finger controls. All right, Fantastic. So the way we are going to handle this is by using custom attributes. We discussed that in the last lesson, so we will benefit from using that. Let's choose our left wrist control here. Now let's go to modify and less click on the add attributes. From here. What we are going to do is add some custom channels for each finger here. So, but before we do so, let's go ahead and add a displayable channel. This displayable channel here reserve as an organization separator. So we know the custom attributes that we personally ad and the ones that already provided by Maya. Alright, so let's have this renamed to finger on the score controls. And let's add that. Hey, it doesn't matter here, the 0, this will not be quay wall and it is not going to be animated. This adjusts for separation of an organization purposes. Let's now with that risk control C selected, let's add the route underscore x. And let's make sure keyboard selected and float also a selected. Let's hit the add and we won't roots on score why? We will add the roots under score z. We will add that. Next. We will add a mid custom attributes here. And we'll add that as well. And the end who add an end customer channel, Let's hit the okay to add and close out the window. So let me now explain those new custom channels have just added. So the roots x, y, and z, these will control the movements across the roots. The bone objects with a suffix of a. So these are going to be the ones that will be control in either the x direction, the y, or the z. And next we will have the mid and the mid will control the movements, grass, the z-axis, each of these bones here. So the mid will be controlling the mid section here, and the end parameter will control this section over here. Again, this is not a very effective way to rig fingers. This is not the way that you want to follow, but as a solar and as a beginner, I want to show you the simplest way to start wiggling fingers. And then later on, when we will start learning more tools and techniques, I will show you another good way, an optimal way to rig fingers and give animators more flexibility and control over the animation of fingers. Okay, but now as a beginner, we will start with this simple technique here just to get you up and running with reading fingers. Let's now move on. So we want to do the same for the other side, but for the demonstration purposes and for the sake of not making this video here too long, I will just work on the left side. And for your homework, you will going ahead and complete the same thing for the other side. All right? Now what we are going to do at this point here is set up the connection and you know how to do that. Let's go into the General Editors under the windows and let's grab the connection editor. All right, great. Let's move this somewhere here. Let's have the model somewhere here. All right, super cool. Now, again, the rest is going to be the parent or the driver. So with that selected, let's have this willow, the two left, which is already reloaded, right? You can see that here. And next we will select the roots of every finger. So select first the thumb, the index a, the middle a, the RNC, a bone, and then the pinky able. And we will reload those to write. Can see my, I have gone ahead and added every bone objects here on the right. These are going to be the ones driven by the parameters we just added under the risk control. All right, cool. So the connection will be very simple. We won't the root x in this case to control, Let's expand the rotation of each joint. We just added. Alright, perfect. And we won't give rotation x to control the rotation at the root x, sorry, for the parameter that we have added under duress, this root x here, we want that to control and drive every x rotate field under the selected root joints we have just added. So from the root x we will drive the root x of the TM, root x of the index root x or the middle a, the rotation x for the RNC a, and the rotation x for the pinky. Okay, cool. Now if we start adjusting the root x to see the effect that we have got, we have a twist in each root joint, right, super cool. Let's now repeat the same process and this time we will use the root y parameter we have just added to drive the rotate y in the thump a rotate y and index a rotate y the middle and the rotate y the rig and less the rotate y in the pinky. Now if we start adjusting the root y, here is the fact that we are getting, getting a movement side to side, right? So something like that. Very cool. And last but not least, the root z will be responsible for driving the rotate Z channel for each joint selected here by select that. And let's start moving this round. And you can see now we can animate a fest, okay? Or a grip. And we will also use the mid section here to give us some more control. So let's go ahead and finish that. Alright, the mid section here is going to drive. Let us first select the mid sections again. So we will select those here. So the mid section of each joint object here, and let's have those we'll loaded in there, right? Right, Super Core. This makes sure that, oops, we have added the geo. So we will select those again. Makes sure to select just the mid bones, right? These ones here, let's have those are loaded to write. And again, the mid-section is going this side to control just the movements in the z-axis. Since you know that these bones here are not going to move something like this. This is not very natural. But in some situations where you have more cartoony character, you may want to have controls to do something like this, which again, I will show you in a later lesson how to add more flexibility to your character fingers. But in this level here, we're just go into control the movements of our mid and add sections here to give us some more natural movement. All right, So the mid section is going to dr. the rotate Z parameter of each joint object here in the mid section. All right, super cool. If we now start testing this out, Let's grab our risk control. If we start moving the mid or adjusting the mid parameter. All right, Take a look. We're getting somewhere. We're able now to get a fist position. And we can get this even better by using the end. And so we will select now the bones and add those to the right to be driven by this end parameter here. And again, we will use the same rotate Z channel to give us some more natural movements in the end sections of the fingers. Okay, so this looks great. Let's now test this. Else is close out this window. And if we start now testing the end sections, right, take a look. We are now able to animate and gets a really cool phase control. This looks beautiful. Awesome stuff, right? Perfect. But again, this is not the good way or the good graph to follow if you want more control over the fingers. Since this is just a simple way to just introduce you to one way of controlling the fingers in rigging, they are going to be different many ways to do just one thing. This is one of those ways. This is the simplest one. Again, I will show you in a later lesson how to create some more sophisticated controls here to give you more freedom and range of movement. All right? But now as you can see, we are getting some really nice movements already from the fingers using the custom channels we have learned in this course here, and using the connection editor. Alright, super cool. So now it's up to you. You are going to go ahead between lessons and finish the other side. And once you do that, let us go ahead and move on to the next lesson, where we will start rigging the legs of our character. 41. 40 Building The Knee Controls: Cool. Let's now have the nice animation controls created. So I will use the already existing elbow controls to set up the knee controls. However, if you want to, you can still go in and impose the shapes we were already using under the assets. So you have the option here as well. And you can also work with the shapes you want, okay, so you have that option and it's up to you. Let's now go in and duplicate to save us a little bit of time, Let's duplicate the already existing elbow in shadow. Let's move this cross here. All the way forward, something like this. Let's hide the model for a moment. And let's use the V key and snap to our knee. Pivot. All right, great. Let's move this forward in the z axis and let's bring back our model. Uh, smoothest forward the beds. Something similar to this. Greatest looks fantastic. And let's have this renamed underscore L underscore NE, 0, 1. We will duplicate this and mirror to the other side. So you know the trick that we will follow, we will use the grouping technique. Let's duplicate this first. And with that, duplicate objects is selected, we will hit the Control G and plug in a value of negative one in the scale axis. So that Maya, we'll go ahead and mirror and flip the new created objects in the negative x, right, great. Let's now go to the Edit with our group selected and choose the Ungroup to eliminate in red of the new group we just created. With that new objects still selected, let's have renamed to Anim underscore or the sign underscore and easy row 1. And now let's grab both new knee controls and freeze their transformations to clean them a little bit up. All right, Great. And with the second or the right ones still selected, let's change its color to a red shade so that we stay consistent with the animation controls. Common red on the right side, right? Beautiful. The left one has already been colored. Sense. We have used that duplicated from the already existing elbow, which was already colored rate. Now at this point here, you know, what we are going to do? This is very simple. We will just grab the left knee and we'll grab the IK handle. If you are somewhat, finding that selecting the IK Handle is a little bit difficult since we are using the outliner to grab it from the IK is group, we have an option here under the Display. Under the animation, we can adjust the IK Handle size of every algae hand on the scene. I think it was at one. And as you can see, one, we cannot access it very easy, right? It is not very big. However, we can change this value here to something like 2.5. And now you can see that we have managed to resize every handle for icky handle the scene, and that will make it easier for us to access every IK handle and select it and grab it very easily, right? So this is one option here. Now we can grab the left knee control and then select Next left leg IK. Go ahead to the constraint menu and choose pole vector in suede. All right, now something very important here that I want to mention is that if I now undo back and let me hit the Control Z to undo back, and let's hit the Control Y to redo it. So the control Y will allow you to redo the last action. You just get in Maya and the control Z will undo, so they are opposite to each other. And now the thing that I want to show you is that if you now apply the pole vector constraint, you may notice a little bit of a shift in the keep the leg. Alright. So let me hit the Control Z to undo before we applied the 0 vector constraint and Control Y will apply that effect you can sway, you may notice a little bit of a shift that soda we find in our level here, since you have just begin to learn Reagan and how to set up characteristics. However, later on in upcoming videos, I will show you a nice little technique you can use to prevent the shifts that happen when ever we set up the 0 vector can swing. The shift happens mainly because there's a slight angle in the IK of the leg. You can see that the leg of our character is created at a slight angle here. And that's why when we set up the 0 vector constraint, it shifts a little bit to accommodate to the position of the knee control. All right. Let's now redo what we have done so far. So let's select the knee control and the left leg. Hi Caine, less, choose the pole vector. We'll do the same here for the other side. Select the right knee control and the right IK leg and repeats the pole vector constraint. All right, great. Now the reason why we are creating or touching or positioning these new controls in front of the legs is that if we now turn on the visibility of our character, let's say we have posts or position those somewhere near the knee or near the leg. Have a look what's going to happen. The legs, when we position the knee control very close to the IK system of the leg, it will flip and that's not a good thing. So we want to prevent this from happening. And this is why we always position either the knee controls or the elbow controls far away from their controlled IKEA's. Okay. So we want to prevent this and that's why we position them a little bit for away from the controlled IK system as have the 0 out to get it in the initial position. All right, Great. And so if we now start testing this out, have a look. This looks beautiful. We are now able to control the twists in the knees of our character. It looks beautiful. All right, let's stop now the lesson here, we have learned how to set up some knee controls. And let's move on to the next lesson and start creating some leg controls. 42. 41 Creating Leg Controls: Time to finish up the leg. So we will add some controls here to drive the IK handle position. And I'm going to work with the CV curves tool again to create a triangular shape. Again, hold the X key to snap to the grid while creating your points and lines. And once you have the shape, you won't hit the Enter key. Let's have the pivot points centered around this new control here. So I'm going to hit over to the Modify and choose center pivot option. Great. I'm going to reshape this control here a little bit more. So I will resize this a bit up, something like this, and I will resize this in the z axis. So to give me a little bit, a triangular shape there is a little bit tall. So something similar to this, right? This looks beautiful, gray. So the animator can access this control very easy, right? Great. And now what we can do is move the pivot points of our new control, TD pivot points of the IK handle. So the way we are going to do this is of course by hiding our model. And now what we can do is hold the D key to switch over to the insert pivot mode. And while holding the D key, we are going to hold also the V key, which will allow us to snap to a specific objects. In this case, it is going to be the left leg, right? Beautiful. Now, as you can see, managed to center and reposition the pivot points only of that object without changing or adjusting as position. Great, Let's have this object's renamed to Anim, underscore, underscore length 0, 1, and let's clean it up by freezing transformations. All right, beautiful. With that still selected less mirrored over to the other side by hearing the Control D and also Control G to create a group of that duplicate objects. And again, in the scale axis channel, typing in negative one to flip it to the other side. And with that new group still selected, let's head over to the edit and ungroup. This will get rid of that new group we just created. Let's have this new can show for the right side renamed to Anim underscore, underscore like 0, 1. And of course we will freeze transformations. All right, super cool. With that, right? Control says selected. We'll head over to the attribute editor and enable overrides. And of course, choose the red shade for the right side, using and for the left side, we will choose the blue shade. All right, super cool. This looks great. Now at this point here, we will set up a position constrain. The process is going to be the same as the one we did for the wrists. So first, this control here we'll control and drive the position of the IK handle of the leg. And then it will serve as a control for the orientation of the ankle bone here. So first we'll select our leg control, and then we will select the left IK handle of the leg. We will choose the point constrain to lock down the position. Okay? Since we have both pivot points right at the same position, we can leave the Mason offset turned off. We will now hit the apply K, and let's do that for the right side as well. So we'll select the left or the right control for the leg and the right IK handle for the red. And let's hit the apply key to lock down the position of the right IK Handle. Great, super cool. Let's test this out. If we start now moving, Our can show animation control for the leg, right? Sake, look, everything is working just fine. However, we still need to lock down the orientation of the IK or the ankle bone or the foot to the orientation of the new light control. So let's go ahead and finish that up. First we'll select the light control we just created, and then we will select the objects or the bone to be controlled or driven is going to be in this case, the ankle bone, the one that we have skin to. And then we will use the Orient Constraint less mixture maintain offset is turned on to prevent any shifting. Now let's hit the apply and we'll repeat the same process for the order side as well. We will select first the rights like control and then the right NCO Bell. And let's hit the Add button. Very nice. Now, if we test this out, Let's grab our left leg control. All right, Take a look. This is working wonderfully. We are now able to drive the position of the IK handle of the leg. And also as well, we can drive the rotation of the foot and ankle, which is very nice, right? Beautiful. Let's see that. For the other side, Let's test this throughout. Everything is working wonderfully, beautiful. Alright, so that's pretty much it for this lesson. The process is very similar to the one we're using for the rest of our character. 43. 42 Adding Foot Controls: So the control that we will add in this lesson, we'll be responsible chicken troll, this section here of the third. Okay, So control this bone here. We'll give the animator, hey, controls used to drive and control the movement of this piece here. Okay? And the shape we are going to be using, Let's think of a shape here that will work great in this case, right? We might go ahead and create an arc shape. How about that? So let's go into the create here. Let's grab the 2 circular arc. We have used this tool in a previous lesson. So let's grab it and let's switch over to the top view. Let's hold down the X key and snap to the grid intersections. So I will create a shape similar to this. And let's hit the Enter key once we finish, right, great. Let's switch back over to the perspective view, right? Great. Very cool. Let's place this over to something or positions similar to this. Unless scale less than d, x and axis a bit, and in the z axis as well. So just playing around with the shape to get something that looks nice. Okay, great. I think I can go ahead and rotate this somewhere about here. So to give me this curvature or at this angle here, and I'm going to re-size this shape down that rate. Let's switch to the channel box. Okay, I think I can rotate this, the x-axis minus 90 degrees. Let's move this to the front. Okay? Let's minimize this a bit more. All right, rate this 0 out this and see, I think I can go ahead and scale this up. This is something like this, right? Great. All right, I think this now looks great. I'm very happy with the way this shape is looking. So let me go ahead now and adjust the position of the pivot points of this new shape here to the pivot points of our controlled bone object, which is going to be in this case the third. So let's hide the model for a moment. And with our new control still selected, let's hold down the D key to enter the insert pivot mode unless also hold down the V key to get the ability to snap to our foot bone using the middle mouse button. All right, This looks great. Let's have this object cleaned up by freezing its transformations. And with it still selected, let's give it a name of Anim, underscore L underscore foot 01. All right, super cool. Let's have this mirror to the other side. So we will duplicate this and have it grouped and scaled in the negative scale axis by typings negative one in the scale, access to have it mirror to the other side. And with the new group still selected, let's ungroup it to get rid of that new group. Then less freeze transformations as well and have it renamed to an underscore. Underscore first one, super cool. Let's recolor our new control objects. The one on the left will be colored to the blue shade that we were using for the left side and the right one will be recolored to the red color. All right, Super Core. Let's bring our model back in. And as you can see, we have a pretty nice foot controls to use. Now, you know the process that we will be following. So you just select the new control or for control shape first and then select the next. The foot bone, head over to the constrain and select the Orient can Swain and make sure maintain offset is selected, then press the apply and we will repeat the same thing for the other side was grabbed the first first the right foot control, and next we'll grab the right foot bone and hit the Add. Let's now test this out and see if everything is working properly. If we start now rotating, right, take a look. We are now able to rotate the foot. This front piece here of Mega Man slack, right? This looks beautiful. How about the other side? Everything is working wonderfully. Super cool. Now these two control objects, this one here needs to follow the leg control. So I will select this new foot control. And then we'll select the leg Control and press the peaky to parent it under this light control. Let's now select the light control and start moving this up. Okay, this looks beautiful if we now want to just this section here, okay? We are now able to drive and control the front or the toes. However, you would like to call this piece here either the first or the toe, wherever you want to call it. So the front, this front piece here, we are now able to control it using our new control, which is following nicely with the leg control. Alright, so let's have the other side finished as well. So we'll select the right foot control and then select the light control, press the peaky to have that parented unless do a little bit a test. Okay, Here's our control and here's the new foot control. Alright, beautiful. So that is pretty much it. For this lesson, we have learned how to add some foot controls to drive the front pieces of magazines. Legs. Let's now move on to the upcoming lesson and let's do a little bit of clean-up work for our scene and some optimization to get our reg to work more effectively and to give animators more cleaned up controls work with. 44. 43 Organizing Our Scene: Haven't organized our scene a while now. So let's go ahead and do that in this lesson. Let's have a look. The outliner, and you can see the new created control shapes here are still of the global control. So they need to go under the global control so that they can be resized and reshape. You can see now that this is not the control that we want. So the global control is not working as it should. But before we do that, less, have the COG, the central gravity as well as the other nucleated shall shapes here. Let's shift select those as well as the center of gravity. And we can have those stored under a separate group for easy access, just like we did for the IKS and the skeleton. So let's press the Control G and let's double-click and have this new group renamed to controls, group, underscore group. This group here will not be transformed at all. It will serve just for organization purposes. So let's have its channels selected and locked down. So locked and high selected, leaving just divisibility channel on so we can show or hide this group whenever we want. Alright, now, with this group of new controls selected, let's have it stored under the global animation control. And let's test this out. If we now start moving the global control. Have a look. Everything is following nicely. Resize this. Yes, everything is following, just nicely. Reorients our shape or our model here. See, everything is working wonderfully. All right, super cool. This curve shape here or transformation node is not serving any purpose. So let's delete that. And now you can see the outliner is much more organized and everything is stored where it needs to go. Okay, So the skeleton contains the bones of our character. The control group contains the controls that drive the character and the IKEA's group is containing the IK handles. All right, Super cool. So let's start the lesson here and let's go and move on to the next lesson, where I will discuss a important topic where we will get and start cleaning up some channels that we don't want to use. And so this is going to be very effective to give animators very optimized control to work with. This will simplify the process for him or for you to animate the character and will give you much better results. So let's go ahead and learn how to do that in the next lesson. 45. 44 Cleaning Up The Rig: In this lesson, let's talk a little bit about cleaning up our red here and the animation controls we have created. So for the most part, everything is now working perfectly. However, you can see, for example, that this head control is moving or use just for rotation. Okay? And so we are just using the rotation channels here. So why don't we optimize this a little bit more and give the animators just the channels that he or she or you may want to use to animate. So let's take a look how we can do that. So let's say, for example, that this head control here will be just used to reorient our character's head. So we can select the channels that we don't want a translate here, for instance, and also use the Control key and highlight the scale and visibility channels. And let's say we go ahead and select the lock and hide selected. Okay, leaving the control object to adjust the Rotate channels that will be used to reorient the character's head. Okay, so now you can see we have got a much cleaner control or animation controls to work with, with just some rotate channels. Okay? This is most small, optimize here and much cleaner to work with. All right, super cool. So let's go ahead and see, for example, the rest here. You can see that the rest will be used for the position. So the translate fields or channels here will be used as well as the rotation. Okay? So the, just the scale axis and divisibility, which are not going to be use in this case. So let's have, for example, in this case here, let's have the scale channels highlighted as well as the visibility. And let's right-click and choose. Lock and hide selected. Okay, looks pretty good. Now, we have got few channels work with, as well as the channels that we have added, the attributes that controlled the fingers. Now you can see a much more cleaner control objects, right? Great. For the global control for instance. Will we use that for everything? So we'll use it for reorienting, for scaling, as well as moving our shape here or model. So we will leave every channel here except for the disability channel, which will select and lock and hide. All right, Great. So the process is going to be very similar. You now know how to go ahead and start cleaning up every control objects. So depending on what you are going to be using to animate your character, go ahead and clean up every control object you have got, leaving just the channels that you are going to be using. Alright, so that's pretty good for now. Now, let's go ahead to the windows and grab the outliner. And at this point here, what we are going to be doing is let's say that for instance, we have got our reg finished. So we want to hide the skeleton because we have created some control objects to drive that. And so let's go to the skeleton group that we have created to organize the bones unless turn its visibility off by typing 0 in this field here. Now you can see we have got a much cleaner rig. Let's turn off the wireframe on shaded. Right. Take a look. Everything is now looking wonderful. We have got a much more cleaner rake to work with. We start now testing this out. Take a look. Everything is working wonderfully. Great, awesome stuff. This is very exciting. I love doing this all time. The rigging process is full of fun and entertainment. And so I hope you have learned so much from this course here. And so now we have everything. Now you need to start rigging your own characters. For any purpose. You won't either animating or just for fun. So you have the options. You are now ready to start rigging whatever you want. All right, this looks fantastic. Let's now move on to the next lesson. And I want to talk about a little issue that you have may come across, especially when you lock and hide your channels here. So let me go ahead and show you that issue. Unless discuss that and discuss how to fix that in the next lesson. 46. 45 More On the Freeze Transformations Feature: Let's have a look at an issue that may arise whenever you want to freeze your objects, transformations. All right, so let's say for instance that this isn't controlled objects that you have built. And you want to, for example, clean it up as we have. So in the last lesson, to give a animators just the Rotate channels to work with. So you know how to do that. We will calculate the channels that we don't want to work with and go right here and choose the lock and hide selected. However, let's say, for example, that we have rotated this control here and now this is the new position that we won't to be the starting point. So we want to freeze the transformations of this new control. And this is, and we want this position or orientation or the rotation here to be the starting point. We know how to do that. We will head over to the Modify and choose Freeze Transformations. How error? As you can see, we have got an error down here. This is an error telling you that Maya didn't know how to freeze this, the transformations of these objects here. That's because the translate and scale channels are also going to be frozen. However, those channels have been locked down and hidden. So my I didn't know how to access those. We have two options here or two solutions. Let me show you the first one here. We can go to the freeze transformations and bring in the settings. Let's reset the settings. And from here we can sense we won't just to freeze the rotation channels here, we can uncheck the scale and translate channels, leaving us just with the rotate channels. And now if we had the applied, you can see that Maya have successfully frozen this new objects here and frozen just the rotation channels because we are the ones who requested that. So we have requested from Maya to freeze just the rotation channels by checking this here from the settings. Okay, we have another options and that is Now bring our translate rotate x or scale channels here on. We can go in and bring back in the channels that we have back down and hidden. We can do that from the edit and channel control. And we can search for the channels that we have locked down and hidden. Those are going to be the scale axis, so we will highlight those and select the move to the left in our case, since we are going to be moving them here in the key oval section. And we will select D translates, x and y and z also move them to the left. We can see by doing that, we have managed to bring those back in, but they are still locked. So we have to highlight those as well and select this time unlock. Selected. All right, we have managed now to bring those back. Let's say that we want to, and we have moved this object here, and this is the new starting points. We want to clean this up. So we go to the phrase transformations and we can select the scale and translate and check those as well as the rotate. And now if we had the freeze transformations, you can see now maya have successfully gone ahead and froze every channel here because those are no longer being knocked down and hidden. And so Maya was able to prose those. All right, this looks now great, beautiful. And so the same thing can happen, for instance, sometimes when you want to lock down, for example, the orientation of this object here to the orientation of the sphere. Let's say, for instance, that you want to drive the orientation of this cube here by the sphere. However, the translate or the rotation axis here are being hidden and locked down. Let's have a look and see what's going to happen. Okay, So for example, we will select the driver first, and then we'll select the cube head over to the constrain. It shows the Orient can Swain. Let's leave everything as it is the default settings unless click on the Apply. However, again, maya will not allow you to do that because it doesn't know how to set up and orient constraint with an object's that it's rotation channels as being locked down and hidden. And in this instance here, you have to go to the Edit and channel control and search for the rotate channels here, and bring those back in and unlock those by right-clicking and choose, Unlock, selects it. And now if we repeat the same thing here, now select the driver and the q, which are going to be driven and select the Orient Constraint. Yes. Now, maya has successfully set up the Orient case Dwayne without any issues at all. You can now see that we can drive the orientation of our new cube with D here. All right, fantastic. So these are some issues that you may or may not come across yet. However, I just wanted to be clear and show you those now and now I think you know how to solve those issues in case you have come across them. 47. Conclusion and Assignment: What we'll be learning in this course is truly amazing. I've gone through building this awesome character rig from start to finish while providing you with valuable knowledge. Along the way, we have learned how to create joints and work with inverse kinematics to give us a more national movements in the legs as well as the arms. We haven't discovered how to form. Our character is using scanning. Scanning is the process of applying the bone objects to form our character. And also we have learned all the tools to improve your character's skin and deformations. So we have learned also how constraint's work and how to use those to set up some really nice animation controls like the one we have here. So he really has some stuff. This is a good starting point now to expand upon and to start learning more techniques and tools to enhance your character race. But before you do so, let's take a look at a character that you will be working on for your assignment. You will be surprised if you know that the character that you will be working on for your assignment is going to be, I think he who know it very well. In fact, everyone does. It's a very popular character that we all have played with it in our childhood. And so I felt he would be a really nice character to give you as your assignment. The proportion of this character here are very similar to the one we have been using in this course. Again, you can use any character you want as long as you truly apply and practice every concepts we have been discussing. So remember, just go through and carefully place all of your joints. Remember to go through the screening process and use all the tools you have learned so far to make sure your character is deforming pretty well. Then at that point you can go through and start creating animation controls. Always make sure to keep things as clean as possible, okay? It's very easy to lose track of your controls and everything you do inside Maya. However, if you take things one step at a time, this won't seem overwhelming. And if you want to feel free to go back to any video, you want just to make sure that you have these concepts down and master them, okay? If you are still unclear about something, you can always ask me for help or any explanation you would like to know and understand anytime you want. I will be available all the time here to assist you in your journey. The takeaway from this is, this is the first step. It is a good idea to get a solid foundation. Now, at this point here, that way you can build from there and truly start to create amazing rakes. So with that said, I would like to thank you so much for letting me guide you through this awesome journey. And I will see you in the next course, Happy learning.