Maya for Beginners: Rigging

1. Course Overview: Welcome to Maya for beginners, a course about rigging. This is actually the third part in a series, and you can take this part by itself because you also have all the project files needed to follow along. We'll start with the basic setup with a prop, which we'll use this hat, and then we'll get into more technical aspects of rigging a character and the fundamentals that you need to understand to be able to rig whatever you'd like. In our case, it's going to be this skeleton character. So we'll take it from scratch and then we'll build a rig and controls so that we can animate this character in a later course. So we'll get into some more technical aspects in Maya, it's going to be pretty interesting and fun because we'll have some creative solutions to very common problems. I'll also walk you through some of the most common pitfalls to avoid and how to begin to think about what rigging is and how to approach rigging different types of things. Here's a great example of how to solve one of the most common problem areas in a human type of a character, which is the shoulder, there's some tools we'll cover in this course, hope to see you there. Thanks for watching. 2. Download Maya: 4 Options: Hi and welcome to this updated version of the lesson on how to and where to get Maya. Maya is a software created by Autodesk, so you can go to autodesk.com/free-trials to get a free trial of Maya. Now, if you're a student and you can prove that through their criteria that they require on their website, you can get a full version of Maya for one year for free, if you're a student. The only thing that it has is a little pop-up window that says, "This is a student version of Maya, you can't use it for commercial purposes," which means you can't make money using that software by the work you do with it. The next best option is the Indie license. That you can get if you go currently, the URL is makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie. Now, the indie license is a relatively new thing and is celebrated by Maya community, because it is so much cheaper than the other license that you can get. Maya Indie has no restrictions except for how much money you can make. I think it's maybe a $100,000, where it varies depending on the country that you're living in. Details will be on the site after you pick what country you're in and download the software, but basically it's a full version of Maya. There's no lack of features and it is one-tenth to one-twelfth as expensive as the traditional license. That's why it was so celebrated when they decided to take the indie license and offer it to more people. It was just something they did on a trial basis and they decided to keep it around, so grab it while you can, it's a one-year license for roughly US $250, and that price varies depending on the country you're in. Now the alternative, the final option that you have that I doubt anyone will pick if they have an indie version available is the full subscription of Maya, which is $1,620. The indie license is a steal based on the traditional pricing that we're used to with Maya, so I highly recommend you go grab the indie license on the makeanything.autodesk.com/maya-indie website. If you're not sure if you want to put down even that $250 or whatever it may be for the country you're in, definitely get the free trial for 30 days and you can get through some of this course and see if it's something you would want to continue to pursue and put down that money to get the indie license. But I encourage you, if you are interested and you're committed to learning and using Maya on a yearly basis, $250 per year is a bit of a steal, so definitely go check that out. Thanks for watching this updated lesson on how and where to get Autodesk Maya and I will continue to update things as they change. This course was made in 2018.6 Maya version. The latest as I'm recording this lesson is Maya 2020.4. Not much has changed between the version that you're watching in this course and the version available today. From 2018-2020, there's not been a ton of updates in the core features of Maya, so everything still applies and as there's new features, I will update the course and will do my best there. Thanks for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Interface Intro: Welcome to this first lesson in Maya where we're going to cover the interface. It's the first thing you see when you open Maya, so it's good to get familiarized with it. As you go through this course, you will become more and more familiar with it and comfortable using it, but it's a great place to start just so that we know what we're looking at because it's easy to get intimidated when you're first starting to learn 3D. I know I was when I opened up a program and you see all these buttons and all of these menus, and you have no idea what's important and what's not. It just looks like some crazy alien interface and where to even begin with that so that's why I have this lesson, you're going to refer back to it, but it's also just to ease your fears. Like you're not going to need to learn every single little button and menu option here to be successful in Maya and use it. I'm going to show you the things that we use the most and in this interface, I'm going to show you how to visually categorize these things. You can know I'm probably not going to use this so visually I don't need to worry about that chaos of all these buttons up here. Let's just take an overall look at this. Normally when you open up Maya, you're going to get some type of a view like this and you can see down here that it says persp. That tells us the camera view that we're viewing in the view port and that's what this middle section is here. This is called the viewport and you can see the axis down here on the lower left. You can see y is up and z is to the left. This is where we're going to see everything that's happening in our scene. Down here we have a timeline for when we start animating. We can scrub this, we can play it over here, we can set it to loop back several times. By clicking that we're going to turn on Auto key, turn that off, change the frame range, all of these things. But typically when I'm using this, I use it just like this. I scrub, I look, and then I can change frame range, clicking and dragging that or typing in numbers here and these two numbers actually just mean the in and out points of what we're looking at versus the whole scene. You can see we can adjust this and slide this around, but it doesn't change the first number and that's why that's the absolute values in and out of the scene. But we can temporarily change that scale so we can see a smaller scale of the timeline. It's easier to scrub a smaller section if it's a very big shot or something like that, and if you double-click it and it will jump out to the whole thing and maximize to the entire length of the frame range that you've set. That's the bottom part and you can see down here in the bottom left, this will be very helpful as you're starting. This will display short help tips and tools and selections. If I'm going up here and I don't know what this is and I hover over it, I'll get a tool tip that will pop up. But if you're looking in the lower left as well, it'll say the same thing. If you're a little impatient for the tooltip to pop up, you can just look in the lower left and you can see as I scrub my mouse through, I'm not clicking anything I'm just hovering over everything. You can see is showing me what each one of these tools is named and what they do. If you leave it over there, the tooltip will also pop up. That's one quick way to figure out what all these little things do up here. Don't worry about what each one of them does yet, we'll get into that later, but just know that these are different tabs for different sections. These sections are also related to these different drop-down menus here. Maya tries to organize the menus into different disciplines, so you can see modeling, rigging animation, it's all separate it into their own menu sets because typically, if you're doing one, you're not really going to be doing the other. In a production, normally this is the linear workflow of how things are made anyways, first you model something, then you reg it, you animate it. For example, you can't really animate something that doesn't exist, so you have to model it first, and if you're going to rig it, then you need to rig it before animation. They tried to do it in a way, an order that makes sense for how you're going to create things, animate things, and render things. That's why these are ordered the way they are and you can see that they change the menu options up here, but only after windows. You can see watch windows and as I change the options, windows stays the same so everything from file to Windows is never going to change and everything after that will. I'm in the animation tab here in the dropdown menu, and I'm on animation shelf here and you can see there's play blast, there's different options and a lot of those things are also here. You can see playblast is here as well, it's the same icon, it's the same tool tip. Even though there's all these different buttons, they actually just put them in more than one place. It makes it look more complicated than it is because the same option is put in several different places. For example with playblast, I could actually even right-click on the timeline down here, and it's off the screen. But if you do this in your Maya, you can go down to the bottom and you can see an option for playblast again. Playblast for example, is in three different places. This is also another reason why not to get overwhelmed while these options, because visually it looks like there's a tone of them, but really they're just the same ones over and over in different ways. Depending on how you want to work or select options, or menu, or how you want to select tools, then the try to give you as many options as you want to really, which is a little too much. Typically you're only ever going to use this up here or the shelf, it's whatever you're comfortable with. I find it hard to remember what each one of these icons are and then to wait for the tooltip to pop up typically when I'm going through the menu up here and I'm not using this as much. But it's definitely nice to have sometimes on a couple different things like in this course, I'm probably going to make a couple of spheres just to show you how things work, and we'll get into manipulating things in the next lesson. But besides that, I don't really use this shelf options all that much. Now that we have this shelf option and some of these menu things covered, let's look at what's in between them. We can see this dropdown menu that we talked about, then there's all these buttons up here and they all do different types of things that we're going to get into a lot later. For right now, just know that you don't really have to worry about any of these things, and we'll slowly cover these later. These aren't super, super important in getting started, so we're just going to skip them now for the interface. Don't worry about these. The next thing we want to look at are these different windows as well. We have a blink window here, they have their own little tabs here, and then there's these tabs on the side. Again, it seems like there's a ton of options, but it's really not. For example, with this tab, this can actually be closed down by clicking it or double-clicking it to open it back up. But if you notice here, this little button gets highlighted and unhighlighted as we're clicking it. It's the same thing like we were talking about earlier in the play blast. It's just a different way to select menu options here. You can do it from up here, or you can do it from this tab. You can see the modeling toolkit. We can go back to the attributes or we could select over here. Why this is significant is because if I create a sphere, this is going to tell me the name, it's going to tell me where it is in space, is it on, is it visible, and the history of the object, and any inputs there are so I can see what the inputs are. This is a quick way to see what's the status of this object, where it is. If I go to the attribute editor, I can see this information displayed a little bit differently. I can see translate as all zero. If we go back to the channel box, we can see that's shown here as well. Just the same thing shown twice like we were talking about earlier. Want to help simplify this stuff in your mind so you don't feel like that this is something different than this. It's not, it's the same thing, it's just in a different place. Just to emphasize this again, I wanted to show you something that I use quite a bit. If you hold down the space bar, you'll get the hotbox menu, what Maya calls the hotbox menu, and I'm holding down space bar and I have all of the menu options available to me. You might be able to tell that it is the same exact way that the tabs over here ordered. Modeling, you can see mesh, mesh, Edit Mesh, Edit Mesh, mesh tools, mesh tools, and so on. You can see rigging, animation, effects, and rendering. That's the exact same way this is laid out over here. It's just a quicker way to get to all of these menu is by holding down space bar, and I use that quite a bit. It took me a couple of years to get used to it and actually use it. Because I think it does take a little familiarity with Maya to feel comfortable with this, but the sooner you use this, the quicker you'll be in Maya. I would highly encourage you to use this instead of having to hunt around for stuff up here and changing menus, you can get to everything right here by holding down space bar. So that's a pretty useful tap that I think will be useful even more later. Now that we know what the channel box is and the difference with the attribute editor, let's jump over to this section and we can see the viewport has its own options. If you hover over each one of these objects, you'll also get the tool tip and so I won't go over each one of these because to be honest, they're not very helpful as a beginner starting out, these aren't really that important. But I didn't want to talk about the different views in Maya. If I don't hold on space bar, just tap it, you can see I get multiple views and typically what you'll see, just click this over here, is something like this when you're just starting out in Maya. If I hit space bar again with my mouse just hovering over a different window, I'm not clicking anything with my mouse, I can jump into those views and you can see what the views are by the camera name top-y, front-z, side-x perspective, and so we can jump between different perspective views. If we need to see something top-down and modeling, we can do that. That's one quick way to divide up the screen as well. If we wanted to divide the screen in a different way, we go to Panels, Layouts, and we can say two panes side-by-side, and that's what I had earlier that you saw because this is the way I like to animate sometimes. I can get back to the perspective view just by hitting space bar, and these buttons over here just like shortcuts to these different modes as well. Instead of hitting space bar, you can jump through. One of the last things I want to talk about is the outlier. The outliner you're going to have open and spend a lot of time. Because it's basically a table of contents of what's in your scene. You can see that we have these different cameras that we saw earlier when we are in the for view setup. They're all gray because they're hidden, we can't actually see them in the interface. We can see that the pSphere1, and that's one way that we can select this object, or we can select it just by clicking it, left mouse clicking. That's two ways this like things through the outliner or through the viewport. That is a quick rundown on the interface I hope it got you a little more familiarized with what you're looking at when you open up Maya, it's not as intimidating as it seems, and if you follow along with this course, you will just pick up these things and so that I won't have to walk through each little button in a dry away. We'll take a project-based approach so that you'll get more familiar with the interface as we go along. Thanks for watching, and I'll see you in the next lesson where we will briefly cover manipulators and how to move stuff around in Maya. Thanks for watching. 4. Manipulators And Camera Movement: Welcome back, and let's quickly cover how to move things around in Maya. There's a couple of things to understand especially in 3D that's important, and so let's jump again here and cover that. From the previous lesson, I still have the sphere here, if you don't have that, I can just delete that and we can go up here to this polygon sphere and click that. You can also get to it by going to Create, Polygon Primitives and Sphere. One other thing that's fun with these menus is you can actually tear them off. You can see there's this little option here, if I hover my mouse just above this, and most menus have this, this one has it. All of these menus have this little option here. If I knew I was to going to make a lot of primitives, a lot of spheres or something just as an example, I can just click that and I'll have this menu torn off. Now I can just click this a bunch of times and if I open up my outliner, Windows, Outliner, I can see I made a bunch of spheres. We only need one, so I'm going to shift select all of those below it and hit "Delete" and I'll select the sphere here. I'm also going to click and drag this outliner and let it hover here and let go so it'll docket in the window here. I close this menu that I had hovering and now I get back to it up here if I want. Now that we have the sphere, you can see that there's these squares and different things going on here, let's take a look. The way that we manipulate things in Maya is basically through several different tools. One of which is you may have already seen by hitting "Q", you get to the Select tool or you select it up here, it's just the cursor option. I can select the object here just by left mouse clicking. I can also select it from the outliner here. We've got the object selected, but now I want to move it. How do I move it? I can hit "W" on my keyboard to pull up the shortcut for the manipulator. I can also select it over here, you see the Move Tool is what the tool tip says and you can see as well that in parentheses it says W. We can also see the shortcut is listed there. Now with the sphere selected, and if can you notice, even with the Move Tool selected, I can select different objects. You don't always have to have the Select tool selected to select new things, you can have the Move Tool selected and you can still select stuff. You can also click and drag to select things in a group. Now that we have this one thing, let's move it around. I can click any axis and it'll be isolated to that axis, I'll undo that and you can see it's isolated because the axes manipulator turned yellow. If I click the vertical one, it turns yellow or the z-axis, it also turns yellow. Now I know, if my mouse is going up and down or something weird, that it's only going to go along that axis. But if I want to have a free movement, I can just click in the middle and move the thing around wherever I want. The other thing I can do is isolate on two axes. That's what these little squares are here, that I can know I'm only moving it in the vertical and x axis. I use these quite a bit actually because in 3D space that's hard to tell where you're moving something sometimes, it's hard to tell if that's actually vertically up or if I moved it back and space. By selecting these, you can tell that I'm not moving it up, I'm moving it in the x and z on this flat plane, this grid. If you can't see this grid for some reason, if you didn't default to that, you can also turn that on here or turn it off if it's distracting. That's just one of these little options up here. Now that we know how to move things around, let's rotate it, we can hit "E" on the keyboard and similarly we can find it over here in this little tool box window. You can actually turn off these options from Windows, UI elements, and you can turn off the toolbox. Now you see that disappears. If you find yourself not using those, it's nice to turn them off and you have more screen, real estate for the view port. But for now, since we're all beginners and we're just starting out, let's leave that up, so I'll go back to the UI elements, meaning user-interface, and I'll go down to Toolbox and bring that back. With the rotation, it's very similar that we can isolate different axes and they turn yellow and we can click in the middle here and have a free form option. One thing to keep in mind is, because we're working in 3D watch the x-axis. If I click the z-axis and drag the red one down, now the red one is where the green one used to be. Did you see that? I just undid it. Right now the green one is going around and if I bring the x-axis, the red one down, now that's replaced it so who's to say which axis is which now? Because before I rotated it, the green one was down here, the y-axis, but now because I rotated z, the x-axis is down here. This option, this view that we're seeing is based on the object, because the object is rotating, the axes are changing and that's something very important to keep in mind because that'll be important later in animation and stuff. Just keep that in mind that because now we're in 3D, these things actually matter, and we can control them in different ways. If we hold down E, which is the shortcut for rotation, if we hold down E on our keyboard and then left mouse click, we can drag to the world option. Now you can see the manipulator pop back to have the green going around here like it was before, even though the object is rotated. What this is saying is, we're now rotating based on the world axis, which never change. Even when we move an object around, you can see the manipulator itself is not changing. We can always have the option, even if an object is rotated weird, to isolate based on the world axis. We just need to change that by holding down E and clicking and choosing this option. If we go back to object, you can see it still kept all those changes and now based on the object's rotation, we can see that the axes are moving all around and that's just something to keep in mind for later. When we get an animation, this will be important and I explain later in animation why that is important. The other thing that just for myself I like to do is I like to only ever stay on the channel box unless I'm doing something very specific because you can see this attribute editor here, you can see it says attribute editor right here on the side, it takes up a turn around. There's just a lot of stuff going on and we don't need it and so I like to keep the channel box open because now we can see the values. We can zero them out, we can click and drag them and then hit "Zero" and zero everything out. This is way more useful when we're moving stuff around than the attribute editor and also can slide that down to free up more space for the view port. Similarly to the rotation axis being different, the move axis can also be different. Right now you can see even though the object is rotated, the axes are pointing relative to the world. If we hold down W, similarly like we held down E earlier, if we hold down W and left-click, we get the same option, world object. Now we can see it's following the rotation, it's following the object axis now. That's just two different ways to manipulate the same object based on its own axis or are based on the world axis, that's important. The final thing we're going to talk about is the scale. If you hit "R" or you can go over here and click the scale button or the scale tool and we can scale uniformly. We can also scale on axis and that's pretty straightforward. We've gotten this far and we haven't moved around anything. How do we move around? We have an object now let's move around it. I want to zoom into it. How I zoom in, I can mouse scroll, which I don't use that much, but the other option I have is to hold down Alt and right-click and then drag my mouse. You can see I'm doing the same thing, I'm zooming in and out. This is why you need a three button mouse because now if you click and hold the middle mouse button, I can pan around, and then, still holding Alt, if I left click, I can rotate around an object. With the combination of these three things, I can do all moves and zoom in on things and say get way out here and I can't really see what I'm working on, I can click and drag and select the thing. I can select it from the outliner and then I'm going hit "F" and jump back to the selection that I have and now I'm free to move around again and do all that. You also get to that option from the view menu here and go to View, Frame selection. One other thing that's very helpful is look at selection. For example, if we're over here and I'm rotating around, I'm not rotating around the object anymore, and why is that? That's because my center of interest is somewhere over here and I can't rotate around the object. If I want to rotate around the object, I can go look at selection. The position of the camera didn't change, but now it's just rotated looking at this selection and now I can pivot around that object. That's one way to help control your camera, and if your camera gets too crazy, you can always select it from here, select Camera, which is whatever camera this viewpoint is, we'll select it. You can also select it from the outliner because we know it's purse, you can see on here persp, press "Perspective". You can see now we have all the values here and we can just zero those out if things got too crazy and of course now inside the sphere because we're at zero world space and now you can see I'm rotating from some crazy point out there. I can select my object, hit "F", and now I'm rotating around it and I'm back. That's a quick introduction on how to move, scale, rotate, and move the camera around. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next lesson. 5. Rigging Intro: Welcome to the first lesson on rigging, where we'll cover one of the quick rig tools, and discuss what is rigging, why it's important and why we need to learn it. Basically, if we're going to animate this guy and we have a model here, how do we go about animating it? There's no way to control it. It's just a bunch of vertices and faces. We could maybe trying to go in here and set keys on vertices, and then be very inefficient if we just picked certain vertices and try to move them around, try to create a pose. You can quickly see we'll get off model, which when we're talking about 2D animation, they always had to worry about, and they had model sheets to make sure that you never got off model and the volume of the character was always the same each frame that you drew it. On 3D animation, what we need to worry about is not so much keeping the character on model, but using the model that we have in a way that we can animate it. That's what rigging is. It's basically adding a skeleton to this piece of geometry. We need to add a skeleton to it. How do we do that? There's a couple different ways and we'll start with the simplest way. We'll go up here to the rigging tab, and we'll go to skeleton quick rig. We'll open up a new window here. You can see that we actually have just a one-click solution here. Luckily for us, this model will work decently well with this depending on the model you have. Definitely feel free to open up this scene and follow along, so you have this model and can play with it as well once we get going here. I'm going to hit auto rig and it'll say we need to choose a mesh first. We need to select them, and then click the button. You can see a lot of things just happened and it makes the model look a lot more complicated. You can see in the outline a lot of things were added. There's a new icon over here, a couple of new ones. This purple one is a joint and that has all the joints in here and they're indicated by these yellow pieces here that are kind of these triangles with circles at the end. Right away you can see that there's a few errors. You can see that it didn't place the elbow and the right place the elbows more on the forearm here, should be up here. But for our purposes, just so you get an idea of what rigging is, we're going to use this quick rig too for discussion purposes. We've rigged this thing. What happened is, it added bones and then it weighted the mesh to these bones. That means that each one of these vertices was giving a value to say, especially in the spine here where we have a lot of different bones together, this vertices here might be weighted to this joint, maybe 80 percent, and maybe 20 percent to this joint. It will have a value of 0-1, which is represented by a color that we'll see later of black to white, and it basically says, follow this joint this much. Once we start moving this, it will be a smoother transition between joints. Let's grab the handle here for the hand and as soon as you start moving that around now we can actually control the character. You can see it's not ideal, like I said, the elbow was in the wrong place. But you can get a sense of why rigging is important and how it's going to work. We're basically going to create a series of joints and then we're going to weight the mesh to the joints. Then we're going to need a way to control the joints themselves, and that's what these nerves curves are. We haven't used them very much. In the first modeling course, we use them a little bit, but we can use these as actually control guides that we can select and manipulate. Because just like we don't want to be manipulating the vertices on the mesh, we also don't want to be setting key-frames on the joints themselves. We want all that key-frame animation to be on a control, so that way we can actually go to show and hide the joints. The only thing that we're going to deal with so that we don't accidentally select the joints is just the control rig. That's what all of these little points are. We can start to see how we can manipulate the model. We can also see that the problems with the quick rig tool is the joints aren't necessarily exactly how we need them to be. We also have no fingers and the foot is a little generic. There's no way to really roll the foot off of the toe or the ball of the foot in the natural way that someone would walk. Currently we can just move it around, but there's no way to pivot the foot off of the ball of the foot, so we need to address that. I'm explaining all of this, the reasons why we're going to make our own custom rig with joints; A, so we can learn the entire process because not every character is going to be the same. You are going to have human characters like a bipedal character like this, you're going to have quadrupeds, you are going to have aliens, even props, which is what we're going to start with so we can understand some of the basic concepts of rigging. But I wanted to just introduce you to this real quick so you can actually have something to play with very quickly in the first few minutes of opening up Maya in the scene. Take a minute and play around with this. The other thing I'll also say is, something we're going discuss later, if you notice when we rotate, the hands follow the waste as it's rotating around. Well, let's say there's maybe a table over here that I want to place his hand-on or Box or something. Let's just say there's a box here. Let's say I've been to over here and I want him to lean on it. Let's get his hand up here, you can see how the weighting isn't necessarily great. It's flattening out his hand, really weird way. This is not ideal, but basically what I'm getting at is, so let's say we want to have him to lean on this. Let's get him to bend his elbow a little bit, so we'll make them lean more. As we lean him, the hand is following his body, and it's not sticking to the box. Later in these lessons we're going to discuss having different spaces, which are basically saying, what is this going to follow? What is this going to follow? Right now it's following the rotation of the chest and the hips here. But what if we wanted it to stay here and be in world space. Be relative to the world, not relative to himself. We'll discuss that later as well how we can do that, but that's a quick introduction on what rigging is, why it's important, and also the reason why we're going to need to make our own rig. But if you want to just quickly get into Maya and look at how to rig something, definitely check out the quick rig tool. There's also a step-by-step process which we'll do in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 6. Rigging QuickRig: Let me just run through the quick rig tool quickly and basically use the human figure we have. Instead of using the one-click solutions, go to the step-by-step, and again the quick rig tool is up here and the quick rig option from the menu here under skeleton. We have the geometry selected and we need to create a character so we can hit plus and now we have a quick rig character. We can rename this if we like. Let's add the geometry by hitting the plus button and for us, in this mesh, it's going to be an imperfect mesh. If you click on this question mark, it'll describe how it's solving this to try to figure out where to place the joints basically. You may need to choose a different option here depending on the mesh you have, but if you're following along with me, you can just use this, let's just say create and see what it does. In the last lesson, I turned off the show joints, so I want to turn that back on. When I do that, you can see in the previous lesson where they misplaced the joints. We can see that they did it again with these guides. The guides are basically saying, ''All right, here's where the pivots are going to be for these joints and we can move them before they actually create the joints. Let's get this back to where the elbow would actually be. Then we can mirror this on the other side so it's symmetrical. I just click the mirror button over here with this button in the user adjustment of guides, we can take a look at the knees and make sure the knees are probably a similar problem. We can move these up and mirror that over. You get the idea with this, same thing with shoulders. Everything's not exactly perfect. It tries to do its best, but that's not always going to be the best thing for you. You have to use your judgment on where joints should be to place these guides. Now that we have that and things are mirrored over, let's go down to the next button here, which is to generate the skeleton and control rig. We can actually only do a skeleton if we want or we can do skeleton and control rig. Let's do both and create an update. You basically have what we had in the previous scene, except the elbow joints are in the correct place now. You can see that it's not actually weighted to the geometry yet and that's the last step. That's called skinning and there's different binding methods that we can choose, but basically we can use defaults and those will be pretty good. Now that step's done, we can actually manipulate the geometry here. Again, we can see one thing that we can do in a future lesson is correct the shoulder area, the shoulder area is always problematic because it's trying to follow this bone and it's getting confused here on the arm pit. It's trying to follow too much of the arm bone. That's the quick rig tool. In the next lesson, we're going to create a rig for a prop for the bone skeleton that we will later rig as well. I'm going to close this out and I'll see you next lesson. Thanks. 7. Prop Rigging Parent Constraint: Welcome to this lesson where we will discuss rigging props and I really encourage you to open up the [inaudible] follow along, either with this video or right after watching the video on your own. Because to learn this stuff, you really need to do it and I definitely encourage you to follow along with the scene files up included. What we have is a hat and it actually looks better than what it seems like in the view part. I've actually added shaders and everything so that we can use this later and if actually unhide the sky that we have here, we can see that there are these little gem stones and it has this felt texture, and it looks cool, I think. Anyway, just so you don't think you're rigging something that's not going to be useful later. This already is ready to go for animation. It has all the shaders and everything that I've created. That is basically using a little more complicated network of shading than I discussed in the previous part of look development. But you can definitely open this up and take a look and hyper shade to deconstruct how I made that shader. Anyway, let's get onto rigging, this thing, when we think about rigging props, we need to think about how it's going to be used, and namely, this is going to be on someone's head probably. But it might also be grabbed and they might hold it in their hand. I might need to be on a table, all these different types of scenarios. Again, we don't want to just leave this as it is right here and start setting key-frames on this geometry as it is. We want to add control curves to this as well, but we need to take into account the fact that there might be different pivot points. If this is on their head, yeah, sure. This pivot point in the center might be good. But if we hold down d and we can move the pivot over here, that might be best let's say he's picking it up from this side and he's going to throw it over his head or something or maybe he's picking up from this side. It need to pivot off of a table so that this end stays on the table longer. All those types of things. How do we address different pivots like that? Well, there's one easy way that we can create a hierarchy of controls that we can adjust that a little bit during animation. So let's first take a look at how this was created. We have the hat geometry and then underneath that we have the gyms and the ribbon. When we have this in the outliner, this type of hierarchy, this means that these pieces are children of this. If I click these two things and I hit "Shift P", that will un-parent them. Now it's no longer in the hierarchy. If I move this, they don't follow the hat. What I need to do is, either I can middle mouse drag them under the hat, or let's say I can do from the view port or the outline, or I can select one and then select the other and hit "P". That'll do the same thing. There's two different ways to do that, and the gyms are special because they are in a group, and they're in a group because there's just so many of them and it just helps to keep them organized and you can move them by themselves or if I need to adjust where they were around the hat, that's pretty easy to do as well, and how to group things. Let's just say again, these are all by themselves and we're going to hit shift p, and how do we get them back the way they were? Well, we can shift select all of them, and then we can hit "Command G" to group them, and then I can rename that then middle mouse drag this under the hat. That's basically what I've already done to create this type of hierarchy that we see in the hat. But this isn't useful for actual animation. This is just organizing the model so it can be rigged. Let's take a look at this. Let's create our first curve control so that we can actually use that to animate with. I'm going to go over to curves and surfaces, i'm going to click the circle here. I'm going to expand that out so that we can actually see it, and typically you want your curves to be outside of the piece of geometry, so it's easy to select. I'm going to expand it so it's outside the geometry, and then I can just parent the hat underneath this nerve circle, which I can call hat control. The only thing that I don't like with this, is that this selection highlighting is always on, right? If you use parenting, the selection highlighting is on. Every time I select this, it's going to be all these green wire frames and it's going to be difficult to see the model. What I like to do instead, and what is a little cleaner workflow is to use constraints, and constraints are very important concept to learn. We've learned a one idea of a constraint which is parenting, but there's also parent constraints. We need to differentiate these in our mind. Let's go over to "Animation tab", and we can see there's a menu button here that says constraint. I'm going to tear this off. We have different options here. We have parent, point, orient, scale, aim, all these different ones, and we'll go through them later. But right now we're just concerned with parent, and parent means both point and orient. Point just means translation. That means moving this thing around in space or the hat, whatever moving something in space, orient is rotation. Orient means this, okay? Parent is both of these in one button. Sometimes you might want to isolate and just have one or the other, but parent is both of them. If you remember, when we parent something, we select the child first and then the parent, and then we hit "P". That's the order in which we select things. When we do a parent constrain as the opposite, we select the parent first and then the child, and then we click "Parent". Okay? Rewind that and listen to that again, because that is going to be very important, and you just need to commit that to memory because that's the main difference there. That's the main point that you want to take away from this. Now, when we select this Hat Control, the selection highlighting isn't on. It doesn't look like we have the hat selected. If we try to move this, what do you know it actually moves. Because if we scroll down the hat from the outliner, you can see there's actually this parent constraint. There's a new item in the outliner, and that's called the parent constraint. We can identify what it is pretty easily. In the next lesson, we're going to add a little feature to this simple rig so that it'll be easier to control the pivot. Thanks for watching. 8. Prop Rigging Pivot Control: In this lesson, we're going to add a very important piece to this simple rig that will allow us to move the pivot around when we're going to be animating it. Let's close the constraint menu here, and let's add one more control here. Before we do that, let also add a group. When I rig, I like to add empty groups above the controls. That just means that that will be a place for us to add constraints. Because if we look at the hat and we add that parent constraint in the last lesson, look at the channel box. We have these blue dots here. That basically means there's a constraint on these channels. If we tried to animate this, it will add a blend thing and it'll be a little complicated and it's not very clean way to animate. That's why we wouldn't want to have the hat be where the constraint is happening. Let's delete that constraint from the outliner. Let's group the hat and call this Hat GEO. Let's also create a group for the control. The control itself might need to be constrained later, to like the head. We want to have an entity group above the control as well. We'll say Hat CONTROL GROUP. Now we can make this parent constrain to the hat control. But before I do that, I'm going to show you one more thing about the parent constraint. Let's say the control is over here and it's rotated and it's doing all these things. We want to snap the hat over here to the control and have it mimic exactly the position and pose itself. Let's open up the options of the parent constraint menu and let's take a look at it. Currently, we do not have the maintain offset on. Because they were both at world space, their pivot were both at 0,0, it didn't really matter. But now that this control is not in the same place as the pivot of this one. Let's see what happens when we constrain them. I'll choose the parent and the child, and then I'll hit apply. Now you can see it actually snaps the object over to the controller itself. That's pretty cool. If we wanted to, let's say have this pivot out here, and we wanted this hat to rotate from this pivot. Then we could do that. But we just need to turn on maintain offset. Now at the parents select it and then child, we hit apply and it doesn't jump over. But now we have this pivot out here and it maintains that offset. That's what that means maintain offset because these pivots are offset from one another. We can choose to maintain that or not. I'm just going to undo this to get these back together in the world origin space here. I'm also going to create another hat control and just follow with me here so that you'll understand why. When I select this and I'm going to duplicate it. I'm going to bring it in and up, just like we can see that there's two different controls here. I'm actually going to put the pivot back down to the world space. You can see up here, now it's pivoting from up here, and maybe we want that, but for now I think I would like to keep all the pivots at world space. I'm just turning on the grid up here from these options, and then I'm going to hold down d and x and middle mouse drag right over that 0,0 grid spot there. I'm going to isolate, select that. Now all of the pivots are in the same place. If you look at everything, the pivot never move there for selecting any of those. But I don't want these hat controls to be even. They're both children of this group. I want one to be the child of the other and we can just pick one. Let's say this is the main parent control, and this is the child. I'll just call this like miner control or something like that. If I middle mouse drag that under here, and I want to give this its own group as well, I'm just going to copy this and paste it in and call it group. So why did we do that? If we use this hat, now that this one will follow. Which is what we expect because it's a child of that. Let's select the parent first, which is the main hat control here. Let's select the hat group, and let's make that parent constraint. Now when we move it, we have all of this together. But if we move this, nothing happens. Why is that? Because we didn't constrain anything to it. We have to think about the hierarchy of things and turn the screen off. If we want this hat to always follow the controls, we want to choose the lowest control here. Because we know that lowest control is also going to follow the parent of itself. The parent hat control up here. Let's just see what happens when we do that. Let's select the minor control, select the hat GEO Group and constrain. Now when we move the main hat control, it does move with it just like it did before. But when we select this one, watch what happens, now that moves as well. Here's the big takeaway you are about to hopefully realize what this allows us to do. Now we can change the pivot, watch this. Let's say that the character is going to pick up the hat from this side over here, okay, from the left side of our screen. Well, it's awkward, there's no pivot over here. All the pivots were in the center. But if we were to take this minor pivot, this minor control, and move it to the center of this control. Now we have a pivot over here, and we can just move that to where we want that pivot to be. Check that out. Now we have a pivot over here and the guy could pick it up from this side, rotate it, whatever we need to do. But if we didn't create this hierarchy, we wouldn't have that ability to slide this kind of hat around within the main control. That's what we're doing. I want to show you real quick, one other neat thing. I know this video is getting a little longer, but I really want to show you this. If we select the control curve. Because right now it's hard to see, especially with this blue background, we can change that by hitting all b like we've learned in previous lessons. I don't like this color to a dark color, it's hard to see. Let's go up here to the attribute editor, and let's go down here to the object display. Let's go down to drawing overrides. Let's enable overrides. Scroll down, and we can actually choose a different color for this curve. Let's do something brighter like that red. Now we can also choose one for the minor control. Let's choose a different color, so it indicates that it's a minor control. Let's choose yellow. Now we have something that's a little easier to see and control. We have done parent constraints, so we don't see the selection highlighting of the actual geometry. Now we have this hierarchy that we can move the pivot around if we like. We made groups for the controls themselves because we're going to need to constrain these to the character's head at some point. We want to have these groups above the controls as well. Because if you remember why we did that, you can see now these are all blue doubt for the geometry of the group. But because we didn't do it to the geometry itself, the geometry is still clean. We could still shift this around if we wanted. But we couldn't really do that with a hat because it's constrained. Let's just grab the Hat GEO Group and try that and move it over here and see what happens. Now we've moved it over here, let's say for whatever reason we wanted over there. Then move that, it just snaps right back to where it was. That's what that means when we see these constraints and these blue boxes here, it means it's a no go. You're not going to be able to adjust this so it's constrained. That's why we create these groups above this stuff that can be a parent and hold that constraint. That these lower children of those groups will have empty boxes here for whatever reason if we want to move that around we can. The same will be true for these controls. If we parent to the control to the head of the character, we wouldn't be able to adjust it on TED, if you say like tips it to somebody or something. We want that constraint to live above it in the parent group. Definitely let that sink in. We're going to create a more complicated rig with a character in these later lessons. But just wanted to give you that prop rigging to introduce you to some concepts like constraints and grouping and hierarchies and why that's all important. Just real quickly, I will also say I'll usually group these together. Then just call this altogether the hat rig so that it's just very clean in the outliner, we have one thing to look at. I'll see you the next lesson where we will look at rigging the bones character. Thanks for watching. 9. IK vs FK: Before we get to rigging our own character, there's a concept I need to explain, and that's the difference between inverse kinematics and forward kinematics, or IK versus FK for short. IK, we have already seen, where if I select 'control' and I move it around, all the other bones will follow that movement. That's inverse kinematics, meaning it's figuring out the motion based on the inverse of where the point is ending up. That's one way to think about that. The other that we haven't seen yet is basically the origin of 3D animation. This is how everything was animated like the original Jurassic Park, this was animated with forward kinematics. Now, if I wanted to put his hand on his head, I can just click it and put it on his head, and now his hand is on his head. If I wanted to do that with forward kinematics, all we would have to do is, select the bone, rotate it up there, each bone individually and I could eventually get it up there. Same pose but with two different types of rigs. You can quickly see the difference, especially with the legs, if I move the center of gravity or the COG and I move it down, his shorts aren't following, first off, but his feet are staying in the same place. That's because those were in the world space. They're not following the route of the body, so he can stand on the ground. If I do the same thing with forward kinematics, everything moves together because it's all expecting to be adjusted from these joints. I could move him down then I would need to move both of these up and then move both of these down, and hopefully that would be somewhere on the groundish. This is actually how the original Jurassic Park was animated. They didn't have inverse kinematics back in the day, so this is the origin of 3D animation, is with forward kinematics and it's still used a lot today because let's think about it another way. If I wanted to have a nice arc with the hand, let's say I wanted to rotate this like this, it has a nice arc. If we're watching this joint, it's following this arc because it's being rotated from this pivot away from itself, so it has a nice arc as he's throwing a ball or something like that. If I want to do that with inverse kinematics, I could bring the hand out here, and then I would have to adjust the elbow, just try to stay back here and then move this down. The quick rig is actually a different type of inverse kinematics. I could actually use the shoulder here. It's trying to do a hybrid approach but typically with an inverse kinematics, you would have to position this thing and then reposition the elbow and constantly go in between those two things to try to get that rotation, like a ball throw in a hand. There's trade-offs for each one, and it's going to depend on what your character is going to be doing. Same thing that we saw with the feet not being on the ground, that's going to be the same thing with the hands in our earlier example of if his hand was touching a table and he was rotating. This also isn't following because it's in the relative space of his chest. It's going to follow his chest. His arms are following his chest whereas his feet don't do that. The space that it's in, is a different component of IK. It's a different component of inverse kinematics. Even though these, both, look the same, if we're rotating the chest like this, they're not. We can see why, very quickly, when we just select the wrist and move it. We can't really do that. If we select the wrist and move it here, it's not going to like that. That's the difference between inverse and forward kinematics and how it's going to affect your posing and animation later on down the line. What we will do is we will do an IK setup. There are some rigs where you can actually switch between IK and FK. They use very, somewhat, complicated math to figure out the vectors so that you can switch and it matches the pose but we're not going to get that far into it. That's an advanced topic that maybe I'll discuss in another course. To keep it simple, I just wanted to show you what forward kinematics is, for the history of animation and for your full understanding of what rigging is in animation, you need to understand both concepts. But for our rig, we're going to focus on IK mostly. That's how we're going to build our rig. In the next lesson, we're going to start to rig the bones character that we modeled and textured in the previous parts of this course. Thanks for watching. 10. Bones QuickRig Skeleton: In this lesson, we're going to learn how to start to rig bones. This character that we modeled in the first part, we textured in the second, and now in this third, we're going to rig him. We've seen the Quick Rig tool, but I just quickly want to discuss also creating things from scratch. Over to the rigging tab we can see we have all these different buttons. If we go to the same rigging tab up here, these correlate to these buttons down here. If we go to Skeleton, you can see Create Joints has the same icon is that Insert Joints actually isn't even include over here. This IK one over here is a secret IK handle. There's a lot of the same tools in the shelf that there are in the menu. You just pick whichever one you want to use. I typically like to use the menu because I can actually read what they are and don't have to guess what each one of these icons are or wait to hover over them and see what the tool tips are. We can pretty quickly create joints. You typically want to do that in an orthographic view, and that means front, right, side or top. We can hold down space bar, click in the middle here, and we'll get to the front view. Then we can just start, for example, drawing the spine joints. I could click here. If I click here without holding down Shift it might not be straight vertical. We can hold down Shift to isolate where we're drawing the spine joints. You can quickly see we can't see that one behind it. There's actually a nice tool here that is X-ray Joints. We can see through the model to where the joints are. I can keep Shift clicking and create a bunch of joints when I hit Enter there, they're all done. If we take a look at these joints, they might not be exactly where we want, because we made them an orthographic view. What I can do is go to another side view or go to a different orthographic view. I can move them based off of their parents, but then everything follows. Then I can just translate everything around. If, for example, I get everything the way I want to and maybe one of these middle joints are not in the right place, instead of moving everything above it, I can hold down D, which is the pivot tool we know of and just move that single joint. That's a quick way to start creating joints and understand how to manipulate them and move them. What we're going to use to our advantage is the actual Quick Rig tool because one of the nice things it does is it also labels and names all the joints properly. We're going to use that just to create the skeleton, and then we're going to finish up and rig on our own. I'm going to click the Quick Rig tool over here. We're going to go to the step-by-step process. We're going to add a new character by heading plus, and we're going to rename it. Then I'm going to select all the geometry and I'm going to add it. Previously we used Imperfect Mesh, but that's not going to work on this one because it's a mesh that has a lot of holes in it. It's going to space out if we tries to use Imperfect Mesh. The one that I've found that works with him is Polygon Soup. If we hit Create, it takes a minute to think and now it actually works. Experiment with different types for yourself if you're following along with the different model, but I encourage you to follow along with me so that it is consistent in your results. If you have any questions you can ask them. I'm going to move the joints where I would expect them to be. For the pivots of the elbow. I'm going to mirror those changes over. We're going to need to create our own finger joints later. But for now let's just get the main joints in the right place, which is pretty easy to do with these guide controls. Now that we've created the guides, and we place them where I want them to be. We can hit this little drop-down menu over here to create the skeleton only because again, we're going to make our own rig from this point forward. Lets say Create Update, and we have our joints. They're properly named. If we go into the outline or if we go over here to the channel box, we can see bones is the name of the character that we've already made. It starts with that left up leg. Over here we see the joint bones, left arm, bones, right arm. It has a nice naming convention to it already built in. One thing that might be a little distracting is how big the bones actually are. They're a little too big, we can't see the spine that well. Let's close the Quick Rig tool. Let's go over to Display, and let's go down to Animation, Joint Size. This way we can control the joint size in our scene, and place it where we want it to be. Now that we've created the basic rig, in the next lesson, let's create the finger joints and then figure out how to mirror them over and name them appropriately. Thanks for watching.. 11. Bones Hands: In this lesson, we're going to create the finger joints for the hands so that we'll have something to use there. Let's go to the top view holding down spacebar, left clicking and go to Top View. We'll use the create joints tool and we'll go over here and just start from the joint that we want it to be from. So I'll click here. I'll hold down Shift, click, and hold down Shift and click at the end. When I hit Enter, I'm done creating it. I'm actually just going to duplicate this over to help speed up the process and I'm hitting Command D to duplicate. Right now they're not all lining up because we did it based on one. But the one that I'm not going to duplicate is this because we don't want any rotations on our joint to start with. We don't want that. Let's delete that and create the thumb from scratch. I'm going to click here. I'm going to click here and click here. I'm not holding down Shift because I want it to follow the direction that I'm creating the joint sense. Now you can see there's no rotations on the joint that we made there. Let's just adjust these joints by hitting W on the keyboard and moving the joints to where they need to be. Let's learn about how to name joints. When you go up here, we can start naming joints from up here, but there's also a newer tool in Maya called Joint Labeling and we can add joint labels as we need them. We can actually show them as well so we can see how we're doing it or we can just follow along from that liner or in the channel box. From the skeleton menu up here, which we got to from here that I just tore off, we can get to it from Joint Labeling. I can tear that went off as well and just get rid of that one if that's what we want to do and we can add joint labels. This is the left, even though we're looking at it from the front always, we want to call this the left. This is left hand. So we're going to use the left label. But we also want it to have the right pinky and finger names. If I click the joint here and I say "label pinky", nothing really happens, if we say show all labels, we can see that it actually did name it pinky finger and these have none assigned to it. But it didn't change the actual name of the joint. That's different from the label. But we can say rename joints from labels and that will change the pinky finger over here. It's going to name it the same though, which is not ideal. It's a center pinky finger for each one of these and that's not accurate. So let's call it left, and let's rename that. Now instead of center, it says left pinky finger. We can just also rename these with either a number or we can do it with saying in joint or something like that. I'm just going to do numbers for now for simplistic sake. We can do the same thing for the rest of the fingers here and I'll speed this up and I'll be right back. Great. Now we've labeled all the fingers, but there's also one thing I want to point out real quick. You can see that when we created joints in a straight line that go along an axis that is linear to x or z or y or whatever, as long as it's in that straight line, the hinge joints here also lined up. You can see these crosshairs in the center of the joint indicate which direction the joint is oriented. But if we look at the thumb down here and we look at this bottom one, that one state oriented to the world. It goes straight across when these are going down the length of the thumb. Why is that? That's because joints only get to point in the direction they're going next basically. So because there's no joint out here that's saying, hi, point in this direction, this joint doesn't know which way to point, so it's just going to stay in world space. That's just something to keep in mind for later. Now we have our fingers done and they're labeled and we can just say, Hide Labels for now. What we need to do is parent them to the system that we've already created but before we do that, we need to get them in place because we go into perspective view, you can see that we actually drew them on the ground there. So we can Shift Select them and hit W and drag them up to the actual hand. We can go to a right view or a front view and we can try to get them exactly where they need to be. It looks like the thumb might be not exactly lined up. So we can go over here to the front view and do that from that view. Cool. When we look at this from the perspective view, we can see that it's not connected to anything, if we were to rotate this joint, those don't fall along obviously. So what we can do is just select all of these and parent them. Before we do that though, we want to go ahead and mirror these over. So let's go to the Mirror tool, we'll go up to Skeleton, Mirror Joints and we click the little square to get the option box to open up here. What we can do is say search for name and replace it with this. What we've already seen is that it's labeled everything with left and we want to change it to write because we're going to mirror it over to the other hand, so I don't have to recreate all of these things. We need to choose the mirror cross, which axis? If we look at this, it says x, y right now. That is this direction. If we're looking at this little icon down here, if we line up x and y, that's front of [inaudible]. We don't want that. We want side to side, which here would be like y and z are. So that's the one in the middle. If we hit "Apply" with all of those selected, it doesn't work. There's too many arguments. Just using our brain, we can say, all right, maybe we can't have everything selected. Boom, we click one and it actually worked. Let's just go through these one by one and mirror them over and then we can verify that they are in the right place by taking a look at them, hitting F to focus upon and make sure everything is named correctly, and right pinky finger, everything is named as we would expect. Cool. That just saved us a ton of time because we didn't have to create that all over again. Now what we can do is select all the joints, the end joints themselves. We don't want to select these at the top. We just want to select the most parent joint, which is the one at the top here. Then we Shift Select this wrist joint and we can hit P. It creates all those connections and we can visually see that. Now if we were to rotate this joint, we can see that the hand actually moves as we would expect it to and now it follows the forearm and the rest of the skeleton. Cool. In the next lesson we're going to continue to rig this and take a look at some new rigging things. 12. Bones Joint Orientation: In this lesson, we're going to talk about something a little more technical called joint orientation. To do that, we need to select the joints so we can see the orient that they're in. We currently can't really see that. So there's a tool to help us do that, but first, we need to figure out how do we select all of the joints because we want to use that tool for every joint. We'd go through here and shift and click and drag, select each one of these joints if we wanted, which I just made these two sets that look equally the same for comparison's sake. We're going to see in a second they're not because there joint orients are different. So if I click and drag, select this whole stack. You can see in the outline I accidentally selected the top most parent of the group. If I click and drag select it that's not going to work. One little script that we've learned in a previous lesson and I think it was maybe the first or second part of the course is the select high script. We can type that down here on the bottom left in the script command. We want to make sure that it's set to MEL, which is Mule Expression Language and select-hi means, select hierarchy. If we hit Enter, we can see that all of the selection changed here. If we look in the outline now we can see that we actually did select everything in the hierarchy and that's what this whole kind of chain of things is called as a hierarchy. We want to make sure we have everything selected to do that. It's a script we're going to need to use over and over. So instead of typing it in every time, let's create our own for the custom shelf up here that we've been using for the modeling tools and whatever else. Let's go to the MEL script and we'll type in select-hi again. There's a space there between select and dash high. We'll select this and then we'll middle-mouse-drag it into the shelf and let go and we're going to say that's a MEL script, and now we have it. It's a generic icon. You can change that to be a different type of icon if you'd like, from this button here and navigate to a different one. I'm just going to choose a different one that I have. Then we can also give it a label here, but because I'm using an icon that already has a label in the icon, I'm not going to do that, but we could do something like this and you can see why I'm not going to do that because it goes over the top of the icon. So if you don't have an icon, you can just use that and to say select hierarchy so you know what the tool actually is for and for myself, I'm just going to delete that. Now, when we click and drag these things, if we use that button, we don't have to type it in every time down here. It does that for us. Cool. Now that we have that, let's do that for both of these. Let's click and drag them. You can see again we have that problem. We just click our fancy little button we just made. Now it selected the hierarchy. Let's go to Skeleton orient joints and we'll open up this option box. Now let's click Toggle Local Axes Visibility. When we do that, we can see that all of these kinds of axis pop up. It's kind of similar to what we see in the bottom left here and the view-port. Normally that shows us the world axes. This shows us the local orientation axes of these joints. You can see the one on the right has a very consistent orientation for all of the joints. They're all going in the same direction except for this top one, like we mentioned earlier, because it doesn't have a joint above it to point towards. It's just going to stick to the world axis. We can see that to the right as positive x and y is up and z is forward. If we look in the view-port down here, that's how the world axis is oriented. It's going to default to that if it doesn't have another joint to point towards. If we take a look at both of these joints, they kind of look the same besides the fact that the axis are different, they are built the same. But if we select all of them, so I'll use the Select hierarchy again. Let's go to the Rotate tool and rotate this one. We're going to rotate it to the right and z-axis. They all rotate in the same direction. It does what we would expect it to do, right? Cool. So now let's go to the one over here where the axis are not consistent and they're not all going in the same direction. I'm going to select the hierarchy, go to the Rotate tool, and we'll go to the right with z. Already we can see this is not behaving the same way as the other one. It's doing a lot of crazy stuff. Why is that? Well, because we have everything selected and we're trying to say rotate all in z. Well, each joint thinks z is in a different direction, so it's going to rotate all the joints in a different way. So even though they look the same, hidden within them is their orientation. We want to make sure in our skeleton over here that we have the right orientation for all of our joints because that could prove to be a problem later down the road. It's just a concept to be aware of when you get further into rigging that that is going to be a problem. Let's take a look at our skeleton here. I'm just going to move these over a little bit. Let's do the same thing for our skeleton now. Let's go to the bones reference, which is the top note is just a locator to help us move and position it. It's not actually a joint. Locators are created from Create Locator right here. That's just how Maya has decided to organize its quick rigs. With that selected, I'm going to do select hierarchy so we get all the joints. When I toggle Local Visibility on, they all turned on. So now we can see that there's some difference here between each side. For example, just looking at the hands, one has y up, one has y down. Let's take a look and see if that's going to really affect what we're going to do. In general, we want our joints to rotate and its main axis in a positive value. Let's just take a finger, for example, if we click on one of these finger joints and we rotate it down, let's take a look at the channel box currently it's all zeroed out, which is good. If we rotate it down in the direction that fingers are rotated, we can see that it's a negative 97. We would like that to be a positive 97. Basically it's a best practice really in rigging that you want the axis that is going to be rotated in most frequently to be a positive number. That's just kind of what an animator is going to expect. If we take a look at the elbow, we can see that that is the case in that joint. Probably most of these were built with a quick rig tool, are going to be in the positive axis. We can see here that might not be the case, but if we jump over this other side, let's see if that's true for this other side. So that is maybe not necessarily the case. We need to take a look at that and see if that's something that we want to address. If it is, we can open up this tool that we have open and we can adjust that. Let's take a look at the fingers. Let's go click on this one and we can say, let's have it negative. So negative to negative should make it positive. [inaudible] apply and we can see it flipped everything over here. Now if we rotate it, it should be positive. Cool. We did have orient children of selected objects are selected joints on. It actually did everything below it as well and the hierarchy. We can just go through and do that for all of these and hit apply and make sure that it is behaving as we would expect it. Yep. It's a positive number. Cool. That is part of joint orientation. We might have to revisit this topic again as we are rigging and discovering, things aren't rotating the way that we expect them to. The spine of course, is a big one that's going to be kind of similar to the example that we used over here. Let's just shift select each one of the spine joints. Then let's rotate it. We can see that it is indeed rotating how we would expect it. You can just ignore the legs for now because we're going to address that later, but in general, we want to see that all of these are kind of consistent in some way and are behaving as we would expect it to in a chain specifically for joint orientation. Thanks for watching the next lesson, we're going to learn about rotation order, which is another important concept to understand when rigging and when animating especially. We're going to learn a little bit about why that's important for animation. Thanks for watching and I'll see you next lesson. 13. Bones Rotate Order: In this lesson, we're going to quickly look at rotation order. It's different from joint orientation because it basically says which axis it's going to rotate first? Which axis is the parent axis? If we take a look at this root joint, the hips joint, or what's commonly referred to as the center of gravity or the COG for short. If we take a look at this and let's say we rotate it. Instead of rotating it, let me just hide the polygons here so we can see only the joints. If I hold down E and I click and I go to "Gimbal", I can see what the rotational order is just by looking at the gimbal rotation. If we rotate x, we can see that none of the other axes are rotating with it. If we rotate one, like y, we can quickly see that the x axis actually is moving now, so it's a child of that. Same thing for the z, we can see that it's not moving anything. This is important because we want to know which axis is going to get in gimbal lock or which isn't because, I think I spoke about this very briefly in one of the earliest videos of this course and the modeling course, an Intro to that about getting into gimbal lock. Basically think about how does Maya supposed to know which axis is which, especially when things are animated. If we rotate y and say this person is doing a somersault and they do a little break dance move and they get to here and now we want them to spin around their arm. Well, how do we do that? Now we've just lost our axis there. There's no way to do that. What that will result in when this is animated is something called gimbal lock. Maya will try to interpolate between keyframes and say, it's somehow of this one, it's somehow of that one, it's somehow of this one, it's somehow of that one, it's somehow of this one, it's somehow of that one. It will basically try to resolve this gimbal lock issue through animating these axes in a wonky way so that when we go from point A to point B with these two rotation keyframes, it's going to spin around all crazy. We want to make sure that whatever our character is going to be doing is that the rotational order follows suit, meaning most likely this character is going to spin around and that's going to be one that we want to make sure that the rotation is following along because let's say the character rotates around and now we want them to bend over. Well, now bending over as y, but it originally was z, it should stay z. We want these axes to follow the main rotation that this character is going to do for that joint. You can have a different rotation order for each joint, up here if we look, this one is working, like everything is following the main rotation that this joint will do. This joint will only ever do this, it's an elbow. It makes sense that the rotation order is such that everything should follow that main rotation. Let's fix this for this hip joint because it's not doing that, when we rotate, none of these rotations are following it. How we do that is go into the attribute editor and for some reason it fell off over here. I'm just going to put that back where I would expect it. We have the attribute editor open and we can go down to the Rotate Order here. We can see currently it's xyz. What we want is for everything to, let me just click another axis so we can see that this one is red, wouldn't follow the x. In this rotation order, we have to think about this backwards. The fun of rigging is becoming accustomed to things not being the way you would expect them to be. For myself at least I would expect the parent to be at the top because that's how hierarchies over here are organized. The parent is at the top, so you'd think the parent of this rotational order should be first. Well, it's backwards for rotate order. The last letter here is going to be the parent of everything. What we want is we want the x to be the last one, so we can pick one of these two. Now if we rotate this, we can see that everything is following along the x-axis and we can see what the secondary one is by rotating it this way and then which one is going to get us into gimbal lock. It depends on what you think this character is going to be doing. Is it going to be doing front flips? Or is it going to be doing somersaults? It's going to go to the side. It's up to you, but the main one definitely we want to make sure everything is following that one. Because we don't want to get in gimbal lock when he spins around and looks over here and then he looks back and Maya has had to do weird gimbal lock thing to interpolate between those two rotations because it wasn't the parent rotation that was being manipulated. Let's make sure that we have that, the x-axis is one of the last letters here, so I'll just choose the bottom one, so we have z, y, x. Let me just make three groups, 1,2,3 and the way to think about this rotation order is we can even do it with the one we have over here, x, y, z. That would mean z, y, and x. That's how this rotation order is thought about in rotations. Just keep that in mind when you're going through this rig. We need to look at what these joints are doing mostly. With a quick rig, it should have already done this for us, for the most part and it does appear that that is the case. It probably did that one on this first hip joint because it assumed it was a spine joint. The spine is most likely going to bend forward and back. But we're going to use this like a center of gravity control, so we want to make sure that it can rotate around and have that be the parent rotation and not have this one be. We've gone through this and we've set the rotation order where we want it to be. We've learned about how rotational reserves are important and what we need to look out for. In the next lesson, we're going to continue to rig this thing with the knowledge that we now have. Thanks for watching. 14. Bones Recreate Limbs: In this lesson, we're going to make our own arms and legs, because the Quick Rig didn't properly set up the joints to use with an IK system, and I'll show you how that works, right now, and why we're going to recreate them. So I'm just going to go over to the" Rigging", select the "IK handle", click these two things, and we're going to go over this in more detail, but as soon as I do that, you can see that it rotates the foot out in a weird way. Also if I do a pull vector, which I'll also explain later, it was also rotating it around there as well, and it's just not super straight. So we're going to make our own legs, and we'll start from scratch for just these couple of bones here, it won't take too long. I'm going to delete these little things, to show you why we're going to do that. I'm just going to delete the legs, and I'm going to show the geometry so that we can see where we should be putting them, and I'm going to do the same thing for the arms, here. I'm just going to delete, instead of deleting, because we want to keep the hands, we just going to unparent the hand, and then I'm going to delete these two joints. I don't want to delete that one. Actually, that should be fine, so I'm going to delete these, and do the same thing over here. Now let's create our arms, and we'll do the Mirror tool again, so we only have to do this one time. So I'm going to the top view. From this top view we can recreate the joints that we need. I'm going to go over to the "Joint Tool", and I'll just start clicking where we want the joints. I'm going to put them in the center of the joint itself, and guesstimate where the elbow is. The other thing too, especially with the IK joints that you might want to consider is, giving it a direction, so we'll want, maybe, a bit of an angle here between this joint, and this joint. I'm just going to go ahead and draw this next one out, just so that it has an area to point towards, and hit "Enter", and then I'm just going to delete that, and this is pointing in the right direction. I'm going to go to "Perspective View", and see that this was drawn on the ground, I'm going to drag it up to where we want it, and hit "F" to frame it up. I think that's a pretty good spot. Now I'm going to select the hand, and then this in joint, and hit "P". Now that's hooked up, and I want to do the same thing over here, I'm going to select the end arm and the clavicle joint here, and I'll hit "P". Now we're already back to where we wanted to be, and all we have to do, is now rename these joints. So I'm going to say, in the same way that these are called bones, left shoulder, I'm going to call this "Bones_LeftUpperArm", and I want to copy that. I'm going to paste that here, and then just set, delete the upper part, and call that "Lower". I'm going to select these two joints, and I'm going to mirror them over, so I'm going to go to "Skeleton", "Mirror Joints", and same as before, we're going to use those same settings, and apply. As you can see, I didn't like what we did, because we have multiple things selected. Let's unparent these real quick. I'll hit "Shift P", and hit "Shift P" with this one, and hit "Shift P" from the hand, and we'll just mirror that over. Now we'll hook up the parents again. Click the hand and that, hit "P", and then click this and that, and hit "P", and we'll do the same over here. Now for the legs, let's do the same thing. We need to pay attention around the feet. Even though this first part is the same, pay attention here in a second when we get down to the feet. So I'm actually going to go from the right side, so we can actually see the profile of the feet a little bit better. We go to the center of the upper leg bone here, and I'm going to go to the front of the kneecap, similar to the elbow. We want to give it a direction here, that it should be facing, and then it should go back towards the foot here. I'm going to go down to the bottom of the foot, maybe in the middle here, and then hold down "Shift" and click out towards the end of the toe and hit "Enter". Now we can go back to "Perspective Mode", and see this was drawn in the middle. Let's go to the front view, I'm just holding down "Space-bar" again, of course, and now we can see that these are straight and lined up properly. I'm not too worried about the fact that this bone is offset. This is still in the center of the foot, so that's okay. Let's rename these and then mirror them over. I'll see you in the next video where we will create the IK handles for these arms and legs. 15. Bones Pole Vectors: Now that we have the limbs redrawn, let's create the IK Handles that we have learned about in previous lesson. Let's go over here to the IK Handle tool. We can also get it from Skeleton. Create IK Handle. We want to click the first joint and then the second joint that are going to be the two end points basically. We can ignore the elbow here in this case and once we do that you can see an IK Handle is created in the outliner. Let's just rename that so that we can keep track of it. Now with the IK Handle selected, we can actually manipulate these joints pretty quickly. It's pretty cool, except for the fact that there is no rotation here because the rotation is not hooked up to anything. We also don't have any curves to control this. We need to create those in a later lesson. But let's move on and do the same thing for the rest of these limbs real quick. Now see what happens when I use the IK Handle and I get close to the shoulder here. You can see that it's maintaining its relationship up until the point that I get pretty close to the shoulder and it doesn't know which way to point the elbow. That's why we need pole vectors. Let's create a pole vector now for the limbs. Let's use curves. You can use anything you want you could use the locator, you can also use curves and for this case, let's draw our own. I'm going to actually use the poly modeling cone here. I'm going to click that. I'm going to reduce down the number of subdivisions so that it is more angular and it's more like a pyramid. With that created, I'm going to solo it out so that that's all we can see and maybe flatten it down just a little bit. Now I'm going to select the curves EP Curve tool, and I'm going to go to the tool settings to make sure that it's set to linear so that they're straight lines. I'm going to hold down V, and I'm actually going to change the background so we can see the gray shaded here a little better. I'm going to hold down V and click in different locations of this. It's not showing up because we had it soloed. I'm just going to un-solo that so you can actually see it being created. I know it is being created because I've done this before but it's just good to see because on this tool we need to maybe backtrack a little bit and go over different parts of the model a couple of different times to make sure that we cover all of these edges. I want to make sure that I'm not going on any diagonals as well, so I'm just going to go through this and create this curve. I'm going to hit "enter" now that that's done and I can delete the polygon. Now we're left with this curve that is one solid piece and we can use for all of our pole vectors. A pole vector is basically going to be constraint that tells the IK Handle which way to point. Let's rotate this forward to say like an arrow. This is the direction to be pointing from. Just for fun I'm going to move the pivot point to the tip of this. I'm going to hold down D and V and middle mouse drag snap that. I'm going to hide the polygons here so we can get the skeleton. I'm going to rename this curve tool Left Arm PV CON. That means left arm pole vector control. I'm going to snap this holding down V to the elbow. Then I'm just going to drag this back a certain distance maybe we have 20, something like that. Now, I'm going to zero this out. This is a very important step because we want this to be the zero world space. We don't want it to have any other values because when we zero this out we want it to get back to the same point. We need to go to modify, freeze transformations, and click that. Now we have all these nice zeroed out things. If we move it over here and we click and drag there and type in zero, it'll get back to where we want it to be. Cool. With this selected, select the IK Handle and then let's go to constrain pole vector, and click that. Now you can see that the pole vector actually twisted the arm a little bit. That happens because we don't have it exactly in line with where this needs to be. We can actually just leave this at the elbow because we know for sure it's going to not rotate if it's lined up with the exact middle there. Let's try that one more time with the pole vector left there. We'll go to constrain and pole vector. Now you can see that the arm didn't flip or anything like that. We can leave that there and then now hit "zero" and it'll rotate a little bit, but that's okay. Let's leave that at the front while we're still getting everything lined up basically for the skinning process. We'll move this back when we're done skinning the geometry to the joints. Also, now that we have this let's demonstrate what it's actually doing. When I use this and I get the elbow in here or really anywhere, if I just have the elbow bend a little bit, it's going to point in the direction of this pole vector. It's a great way to control what's happening with the elbow. Let's grab this and duplicate it out and do this for the rest of the joints. I want to say real quick too, I'm going to zero this out only in the z direction. I don't want it to go back to where it's going. I want to go back to z. I'm going to freeze transformations from here and then I'm going to snap it back to the elbow as we did before so that we know that it's going to go back when we zero it out later. I'm going to shift like this and go through that and I'm going to do the same thing for the knees. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will continue creating the controls for these IK Handles. Thanks for watching. 16. Bones Hand Controls: In this lesson, we're going to create the controls for the hands and the feet. We're going to just only get partially done with the feet and we'll follow up on the next lesson about how to properly create all the controls on the feet. But let's get started on doing that now. Similarly to the last lesson, I'm actually going to unhide the polygons here, so we can see this again. I'm going to drag this over to the side so we can see a little better this time. I'm going to create a cube and then I'm going to go to the curves and surfaces like we did last time and make sure from the tool setting that we're on linear so that it's straight edges. Then I'm going to hold down 'V' and click on each one of these corners, so that we make sure that we have everything covered on the edges. Then I hit "Enter" and delete the cube. Now we have our curve. Because we moved a little over to the side, the origin is over here, so all I have to do is say, modify center pivot and boom, there we go. Let's hide the polygons again. Close this show menu are two over here by clicking that. Let's hide the polygons one more time so we can vertex snap with that CON selected, vertex snap to the hand. Let's just increase the size of that, just a touch. Then of course, like we did on the pole vector, let's freeze the transformations because anytime we zero this out, we want to get back to this origin point. Let's call this Left_Hand_CON. Let's duplicate it and drag it over here to the right hand by hitting 'W' and then holding 'V' to vertex snap it and we'll just rename that 'Right'. If you remember in a previous lesson we talking about having empty groups so that we can strain these things. Let's go ahead and do that now. So I'm going to make an empty group from this hand area, but I'm also going to, for cleanliness sake, make it at this origin. How I do that is by typing in group here instead of hitting this shortcut Command 'G'. When we do that, it actually has the pivot point and the center of the object that we're creating it from. So I'm going to copy paste the name here and instead of CON, I'm going to call it Group. I'm going to do the same thing for this side. So that way, if we want to constrain this CON to something, we'll constrain it with the group and not the CON itself, so that the CON is still free to have animation on it. It won't have the little blue boxes here that will prevent us from animating it. So let's actually hook this up to the IK controller. So let's go to the IK left arm, and let's focus on that. So let's select this object and we will Command-click the IK from the outliner. Let's go to constrain and use a point constraint. Let's just open that up to make sure that maintain offset is on. Even if it wasn't, it shouldn't matter because they're snap to each other. So let's hit "Apply". You can see that nothing that looks like it happened besides the fact that the IK handle now has those blue little dots which means, of course, if we scroll this down, we can see indeed it does have a point constrained. You can also see the pole vector constraint as well there that we did in the previous lesson. So now if we move this CON around, it is what is controlling the IK handle now. So now we don't have to worry about the IK handle. But how do we control the rotation of the hand because it's not rotating with this con anymore? That's pretty easy. Let's go to the IK CON here, the hand arm CON. Let's select the hand joint and go to "Constrain", "Orient". With that selected, we say maintain offset. All that's fine. Hit "Apply". Now you can see that there's blue dots and the rotation of the joints. So now if we move this, everything still moves, but it's locked in rotation to the CON itself. So now we can actually rotate the hand as we need it. That works really well. Similarly, we want to make sure before we get too far that these rotations have the right rotation order like we talked about in a previous lesson. So let's go into the Gimbal mode here by holding down 'E' and going to "Gimbal", left clicking there. Let's just see that it is working how we would expect it to. That looks like that'll work pretty fine. You know what? That won't work very well because if we bring the hand out in front and then we rotate it to be pointing forward, we're [inaudible] gimbal. Check that out. We do not want that for sure. So let's undo that. Get this back to origin, and let's go to the rotation order and fix this. So we need to go down to the CON here to rotate order and let's choose this bottom one and see that that actually is not what all we want either. Let's think about what we're doing here. We want the parent CON to be y. We want that to be the last letter in this order. So we want one of these two. So now we have what we need. Cool. Don't forget we do this for this side as well. So we need x, z, y, is what we did over here. So let's do x, z, y over here. I hope that gimbal things make sense now. You can see where the controller that we're going to move around a lot everywhere in 3D space, we're going to need to rotate it. That it's going to need to move with itself. Well, it looks like this isn't the best rotation order either for that because now we're in gimbal here. So let's choose the other rotation order that has y at the end here. It's z, x, y. So let's just see if that works for us. Z, x, y, cool. So let's bring the hand down. We haven't hooked up that, I can't handle it up. So let's use this one. This is part of rigging, like you do something and then you test it to make sure it's going to behave the way you want it to. Cool. I don't think we'll ever really get, well, we might. I mean, this is the thing with rotation, especially something that is going to move in a lot of axes, at some point it may very well get into gimbal. There's only so much we can do to prevent that. So like there's an example of us getting into gimbal there. So you have to pick your battles and where you want to address this. But I think for the most part, let's think about this. If it's down to a side, this is the most common thing. Let's do that. Let's have z be the one. Let's rethink this here because in reality, most people aren't going to have their hands out in front of them. So we want z to be the last one. So I think that works fine. Let's think about all, because you have to consider all the scenarios here in light of the most likely one. So the most likely one is the hand is going to be down here by aside and rotated like that. That's how most people stand. So I think that is probably going to be the right rotation order. It took just messing with this, thinking about it, talking through it. How are we really going to use this? Y, x, z is what we need the other one to be. Cool. So let's go over here, y, x, z, and let's do the same constraints with this side. Great. Now when we select this, everything should follow along just fine. Great. So the other thing you might notice is the fact that the pole vector doesn't move at all. It's just going to stay wherever it is. There's one thing that we can do with that as well. We can actually make groups for these and then constrain the groups to the hand so they follow along. So let's do that now. Let's select this and hit "Typing Group". Let's just copy this into the group and do that for the other side and the legs. Cool. Now that we have that done, let's take a look at what actually will happen now. So let's constrain the group of this pole vector. So it's this one right here. I'm just going to minimize these so we can focus in on the outline or what we're actually going to use. It's just going to be this one and this one. If we hit 'F' here, it'll open that up. So we want the group of this to follow this. So let's select this first and then the group of the pole vector and say constrain parent. Now, when we move this, the pole vector should follow. But it's not ideal right now because we haven't zeroed this out. So let's zero this out now. If you remember from the last lesson why we left it here, we'll just zero this out, so it's back here. Now it gives us some room. So when we do this, the pole vector should follow the hand and the arm. Let's move this back to object. The only thing that we might want to do is use a point constraint instead of a rotation because you can see as I rotate the hand, this thing goes pretty wild. So that's not really what we want it to be doing. We wanted to be in the area. We wanted to generally be where we are moving the hand. So we want a point constraint instead. So let's go to the group of this, which is here, and delete the constraint and use a point constraint instead. So I'll select the hand, go to the pole vector group, Command, clicking it from the outliner and go to constrain point. Let's do the same thing over here. Now when I select this and move it around, we can see that it should be moving with it. Again, if I zero these out, which should be fine now because we have constrained orientation of the hand joint to be to the CON. So it shouldn't really matter how far away this goes. I zeroed it out, you can see the hand stays the same, the joint stays the same. Now we can have those out where they need to be. Now when I move this, the pole vector should try to follow along a little bit. This is just something that is a preference. You might not want that to take place. You might want it to be doing its own thing. But the nice thing about having these groups is the fact that the constrain lives in the group. If I select the controller and press 'Up', I get to the group. I can see that these are indeed locked here in the constraint. But when I select the control, I can still manipulate the control all around. So that's one way to organize this. So they can get some, not animation for free, but have it organized so that when you move the hand in, the pole vector is not trying to stay in the same spot. So in this lesson, we learned quite a bit about pole vectors, making constrains and IK's. I think we've done a lot. In the next lesson we're going to take a more in-depth look about the foot. It's actually one of the most complicated things we're going to cover in this course. So let's take an entire video to definitely cover that and why this is important. Thanks for watching. 17. Bones Reverse Foot Rig: In this lesson, we're going to learn about Reverse Foot Rigs and why that's important. If we take a look at the foot down here and we click the IK handle and start moving it around, we can see that the foot just does whatever it's going to do. Partly that's because the pole vectors here are still at the knee. But even when we pull those out, you can see that the foot tries to stay pointed downward, and then we would have to maybe do something like this and rotate the joint individually. But if we think about how a foot moves, it does a heel to toe action, so it pivots from the heel and then pivots off of the ball and then the toe, so we need to create that type of a rig in our skeleton as well. To do that, we're going to create what's called a reverse foot rig, and there's several different ways we can do this. Well, this is just the way that I like to do it, so I'm going to go to the rigging tab here and get to the joints. I'm going to go into the right view so we can get a look at the foot. Now that we're in the side view, we need to enable the view of the polygons because this rig is going to be based off of the shape of the polygons and the foot, so we need to create a joint basically where the heel's going to pivot from back here, and we need to go all the way to the toe, and then we need to go all the way to the ball of the foot and the backup. We basically made a reverse joint chain of what we already had built. The only thing left to do is to actually get this in place because we made this in the whirled position there, so let's get that out there and let's vertex snap these to the joints that are there near. I'm going to select this one, hold down d and v, and middle-mouse drag it to the joint. I'm going to select this middle one and do the same thing, hold down d and v middle-mouse drag, and get it to the joint and just make sure it actually went to the center there and it did, and turn off the show polygons real quick while I'm doing this to make sure I'm not vertex snapping to the geometry. I want to vertex snap to the center of these joints, so holding down d and v, I'm going to vertex-snap that. Now what we have is a little joint chain that is going to behave the way that I described. We have a heel pivot and here, we have a toe pivot, and we have a ball-joint pivot. Cool. Now all we have to do is rename this and rig it up to work with the foot, so I'm going to rename this and I'll see you in one second. Now that we have that rename, lets mirror the silver very quickly with the mirror tool. Go skeleton mirror, and we have all the things properly labeled so that it's going to be named the right thing over here. Cool. Great. Now we have a foot rig built, we have the original and we have the reverse foot rig. Let's make the reverse foot rig display a little bigger, so I'll select the hierarchy of it and go to the radius and increase that, so now visually we can tell the difference between the reverse foot rig and the original foot joint chain here, because we want the IK handle to follow this reverse foot rig, so let's make that happen to the top joint because if you think about it, sure if we were to point-constrain this to this heel bone, then it would follow along like this. But when we move to rotate the toe, it would stay behind because it's just falling the rotation and position of this. We want to constrain it to this end joint because we want it to be up here. We want the IK handled to follow this one. I'll do that, and let's select that in joint and then the IK handle, and then go to constrain, point constrain. Now and we select the reverse foot rig, and we move it around, you can see that it does follow, and if we move and rotate the toe joint here, it should follow as well, and you should do this every time you make a constrain, you want to test that it's working in the way that you would expect it to, so everything is except for the original foot chain here, which you can see here, that is not following along anywhere, so we need to do that next. Let's select the end-joint here, and let's orient-constrain these original foot bones to the reverse foot rig of the joint in front of it, so the bone in front of this one that it should follow is the toe, so select the toe and then the original and go to constrain orient. Let's do the same thing here, which is like the ball, and then select the original and you constraint orient. Now we have the same behavior that we had before. Everything follows except now the original foot rig follows the reverse foot rig, so that's exactly what we want, so if we were to to make the toe go up and pivot from the toe, the entire foot rig will follow, same thing if we pivot from the ball of the foot, the ankle and everything will follow as well. Great. In the next lesson, I will create a control for this and show you how to do self-driven keys to drive this foot control from one attribute and the attribute editor over here, so go ahead and create the same foot rig for the right as well, and in the next lesson we'll create the nobs control curve here to control the foot. Thanks for watching. 18. Bones Foot Roll SDK: In this lesson, we're going to learn about creating control for the foot and what is called Set Driven Keys, or SDKs, for short. Let's create the control for the right foot right now, and we'll create a circle curve here by going to the curve shelf. We want the pivot of this to be at the ankle, so we're going to hold down V and middle mouse drag, and try to vertex snap that to the middle of this joint. Now that we have that, let's right-click on the curve, and go to Control vertex, and drag that to the bottom. If we try to click "Select", drag that we won't be able to because it's trying to grab the IK and the joint. So let's turn off the visibility for that. Now we can grab that with no problem. Let's go to the right view. We can just hold on X and snap that to the bottom, to the zero of the world space. Let's go back to perspective, and now let's turn back on polygons and we can see where we need to drag these points to, to create our control rig for the heel and the foot. So I'm just going to take a second to create my own little curve here. So one thing I'm going to do is just lift up the heel here, just a touch so that we actually have something to select when the foot is flat on the ground. Otherwise, if the foot's flat on the ground, might be hard to see and select this thing. So that's why I'm just going to grab the heel and put up. You can make any kind of design that you'd like, but this is just one little variation I'm going to do so that I can actually see and select this control when it's flush with the ground so that it actually has something sticking up in the y-axis. Cool. Now we have that control. Let's constrain the joints down to that. Let's turn off the polygons again so we can see what we're going to be working with and turn back on the joints. We can turn on the IK handles as well. Cool. We want all of this to follow this IK handle. So we need to constrain this heel to the IK controller as well. Let's do that. Let's constrain the heel to the control. I'm just going to change the color here, so it's a little easier to see like we did before. Go to drawing overrides and enable that. For the left side, I'd like to use blues. So I'm going to find the blue color and use that. Like before, we want to try to keep the rotation open on this joint because we're going to use this later. We don't want to constrain the actual joint itself. You guessed it, that means we need to create a group for this heel so that we can constrain it in the group. I'm going to click that and I'm going to copy it, and then I'm going to group it. We can just use control G here. I'm going to go left heel group. Now I'm going to use that group to constrain to the heel. I'm going to select the control curve first. Actually, before I do that, I want to zero this out. Remember before, we went to modify freeze transformations. Let's do that before we start making constraints as well so that when we hit zero on everything, it'll get back to where we expect it to be. With that selected, I'm going to actually just rename them real quick. I'm going to say Left Foot CON. I'm going to constrain that group to that, so I'm going to parent constraint, so when we rotate this, it will rotate with the control and it will move with it. Cool. Now we need to hook up through self-driven keys, the rotation of these joints so that we can have all of these different pivots. We have essentially three different pivots; we have the heel pivot, we have the toe pivot, and we have the ball pivot, but I want to create a control that controls all of these from one. Let's go click on the controller and let's go to edit, add attribute. We get a new menu, and we can give it a name. Let's call it Foot Roll. We want it to be a float because it's going to be a number, and there is no minimum or maximum right now, we can change all that later. I'll say, okay. Now you can see we actually have a new value here. We middle mouse drag it and nothing happens because we need to hook it up. Let's go to "Edit", "Set Driven Key". Now we get another new menu. The driver is going to be this controller. We need to load this as the driver. Right now it's the driven, and that's wrong, we want it to be the driver. Let's say load driver. Let's select the actual attribute, because we need to select which one we're saying is the driver of this object here. Now we can select the heel. We need to add that as the driven. Let's see which axis we're talking about. It looks like the Z, so we want the Z-axis, we can see it changing over here. Let's say rotate Z. Right now with the foot role at zero, and the rotate Z at zero, we want to set a key, so let's set a key. Now, let's change the value of the Foot Roll to be something in the negative. Let's go maybe 60. Well, let's just go to 90. Let's do something further than what we're going to need it to be. Let's go to 90, and then under rotate Z, we can actually double-click this and get back to the joint, or we can select it there, and we can change this to be rotate 90. So it's way beyond what will ever need. Now it's set a key. What did we just do? If we go back to the Foot Roll and we middle mouse drag this now, we actually have mapped the rotation of that joint to a new attribute in our controller. But if you notice, this slows down when we're at the either end, and that's because the tangents are Bessie's blind. Let's open that up and take a look at what's actually happening in the animation of this connection. I'll go to the graph editor. Let's go to the left heel, which actually has the animation. You can see in fact, it is slowing down at the beginning and at the end. Let's select both of these key frames and go do a linear interpolation. Now when we select the CON, and we do a Foot Roll, it's going to be a straight interpolation, it's not going to try to slow down at either end. Cool. Now let's do the same thing for the ball and the toe rotation. I'm going to load in these joints as the driven. We've already got the heel done, let's load the driven of the left ball. Let's make sure that the foot roll is at zero, and let's set a key. We're going to make sure too that we're working on the right axis of this joint, so again, it's going to be rotate Z. Let's select "Rotate Z", and hit the "Key." Now we have a zero position. Now let's go back to the Foot Roll, and let's increase this to maybe 45, I believe, I guess negative 45, and then let's go to the joint here, and let's do the same thing here. Let's go 45. Let's take a look at that, because what we're going to make, we're going to build in the heel to toe action. I think that's too much. I think we actually want it to be something like maybe 30. With that selected, let's choose 30. I think that's probably closer to what we would expect Foot Roll to be. Let's go to the CON, and let's change that to negative 30. It changed the left ball because it's thinking it's trying to follow that, so we just need to get that back to 30, and now set a key. Now when we go to Foot Roll, and we go back and forth, we can see that we go from a heel to a flat foot, the ball of the foot starts lifting. The heel starts lifting up this way, so we have this type of motion. Now when it gets to 30, it stops. Let's go to 30 or negative 30. You could do this in negative or positive. It doesn't really matter which way you do it. It's just whatever you prefer. I just chose, I guess, this is positive for me and the heel touchdown there. Let's go to negative 30 in the Foot Roll. Then let's add in the toe for the driven here. Let's set a key. Let's make sure it's the rotate Z again, it is. Let's choose the rotate Z. With the Foot Roll at negative 30, let's set a key. Basically, what we're saying is, we want the toe to pick up where the ball of the foot leaves off. Now that we have that, we can rotate this. Let's see what we want it to go to because I think probably 90 is too much. Let's do something. I guess we could do 90. Let's just do 90 because, like the heal, we will never do 90, but it's nice to have the extremes. Let's go negative 90. With that, we can rotate this up 90 and we can set a key. Now the other thing that we need to do is to also set a key for the ball of the foot, because we want it to straighten out here, we don't want it to continue to stay at this angle. Let's load back in, the ball, and go to Z, and zero that out. Now we can set a key for that. What we get is a Foot Roll from the heel to the toe. Check that out. It's all in one control. We don't have to animate three different joints. We get that all in one control. I'm just sliding this around. We just need to fix the animation of these joints because they're also smooth transition. Let's go back to the animation editor, graph editor. Let's look up this control here, and let's just make that linear. Let's do the same thing for the ball foot. We'll make that linear. Now for this attribute on the curve, let's make the positive, the min-max, the 90. Let's go "Edit", "Edit Attribute". We can select the attribute, and say it has a minimum and has maximum. The minimum is going to be negative 90 and the maximum positive is going to be 90. Let's say close. Now, it won't let us go pass those values. Now it'll go to 90 and stop. Great. Let's do this reverse foot rig set up for the other side, and then let's finish out the foot rig and create a separate control just for the toe. I'll see you in the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 19. Bones Independent Toe: In this lesson, we're going to create an independent toe control. If we take a look at the foot as it is now, we can see that we can have this control or the foot role. But imagine that we want the toe actually been backwards. Let's say it's dragging back and we want it to go that way. Like the toe is pushing off. There's currently no way for us to do that, so we need to create another control in here. Let's think about this. We have the foot role here, which is on the main control. Underneath that, we need the toe control to follow that. We are going to have the toe control and we need the toe control to control the new joint. For us to do that, we need the orientation to be opened on this. It needs to follow that. That's what this arrow is here. For us to do that, we need to create a group here for the toe con so that it is actually going under that group. It's not being constrained from the toe con, it's being constrained from this group. So let's insert this group. Let's create the toe con. Then we can add this new joint or in constrain it to this toe con, here. Let's run through that. We can actually duplicate this joint here, which we already have Command D, and we'll hit F to focus upon it. We can get rid of this constraint, which is what was going to the reverse foot rig earlier, and we don't need that. Let's just call this left football. I'm just going to say I and D for independent. I'm just going to make a little underscore here, and do the same thing for this in joint, even though it doesn't really matter. Now at this joint, we need to create a con for it. Let's go up here and create a circle. It's a vertex not far to the joint over here. Rotate it 90 degrees so we'll be able to see it. Now let's freeze the transformations as we've done before, modify freeze transformations. Now lets create group for it, and let's name the group and the toe control here. Just say "Left_Toe_CON," and want to copy that, paste that here. I'm just going to say "_CON_GROUP." Let's constrain the group to this original joint up here. We'll take that one, it's actually the football here, which we can't see the selection highlighting because it's just right on top of the one we duplicated it. But we know it's there, if we do the isolate select, we can see that's what we are actually selecting. Now select the toe con group here and do a constrained parent constraint. Now when we do the foot roll, the con should be exactly in line with the reverse foot rig and the original foot toe there. What we can see we have this independent one, isn't constrained anything yet, so just floating out here by itself. Now we can actually constrain that to the con, so zero this out and let's go to the Independent toe joint here. It has all these 180 degree your things and they cancel each other out. So I'm just going to zero that out before we create this constraint. So we can select the toe con and let's go to the independent joint and say constrain or in constraint. Now, when we do this, we can see that we have a foot role still works and everything is following the foot rolls still. But what we now have is this extra layer of control. Or we have this extra little toe here, which we could do whatever we want to with. That's pretty cool. Let's change the color of this and let's do this to this other side as well. Let's also just remember this for the future that the joint that we need to constrain to the geometry that we need to constrain the joint to, is this joint here, independent. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will cover more about cleaning up the rig and getting into some of the [inaudible] issues here. We're moving along quite well. Thanks for watching. 20. Bones Organize And Scale: In this lesson, we're going to organize the outline on the rig a little more before we move on. We want to think about how we want to use this rig and possibly scale it and what that means for our organization. If we select the top most node here, which is that locator that the quick rig tool gave us and we'll just try to scale the whole rig up, let's watch what happens. Everything that we've created stays in the same spot. It doesn't follow along and play nicely like we wanted or expect it to. Let's create a little organization over here in that liner and a few constraints to help solve that. First, we need to select all the CONs. So let's just Command, click them to get all of the CONs together. We can group them into one group so Command G. I'll call that CON group. We want to rename these groups with some indication that it's actually a joint. So I'll call it JNT here. Let's put those joint groups under the Bones as well. Now the IK handles can stay by themselves. They're constrained and that's okay. They can stay by themselves. What we want to do is constrain the CON group to this because we want it to follow, when if we scale up or if we move the rig around, we want it to follow this main locator. So let's adjust that. Let's go to the Bone reference, which is the main controller here, the route control, and Command click the CON group and go to Constrain. We'll just tear that off because we're going to do a Parent and a Scale. We can leave that selection up and now when we go to locator and we scale it up, everything should follow. When we move it or rotate it around, everything should follow together. Cool. The last thing that I would suggest that we do is just to group everything down and say Bones rig is the main group of everything. We won't use that to translate anything but we'll only ever use this Bones reference. Now, let's just rename that to route. This is just something that I prefer to call. People will know what you're talking about more if you call that a route, the route control. Now that we have that organized, let's move on to the next lesson and continue to create this rig. Thanks for watching. 21. Bones COG And Hips: In this lesson, we're going to take a look at creating an independent hip control. If we select what is currently called the hips, bones hips this joint here, and we try to rotate this, it's going to move the entire spine. We want something that control the hips by itself without moving the entire body. For us to do that, we need to split apart where the legs meet the spine and create our own hip joint in here. When I hide the polygons for now, I'm going to go to the rigging menu here, select the joint, and I'm just going to make one down here at 00 and hold down x and click, then I'm going to drag this up and hold down V and vertex snap it in the center as well. Currently it's constrained to the y-axis, so I'm going to select in the middle there to make it unconstrained, hold down V and middle mouse drag there. So I'm going to call this Bones_Hips. Now that we have this renamed to Bones_Hips, let's rename this joint to Bones COG, or Center of Gravity. Let's unparent the legs from that joint. So I'm going to click both of those and hit "Shift P", and then I'm going to select this new bones hip joint here from the outliner, and hit "P". Now that we have that, we can see that if we were to move this Bones_Hips joint, it will actually only control the hips, and that's what we're looking for. Now we have the COG spine here, which will move all of the upper body, now we just need to connect these two pieces. We could do that several different ways, I'm going to do it with a parent just to keep everything nice and neat. So I'm going to select the child first and then the parent, and then I'm going to hit "P". Now we have this extra bone that lives inside of this joint and it's kind of hard to see they're connected, but they are indeed connected. Let's create our own controls now for those, we can do that with our own controller here in the curves menu, I'll just create a circle here, and I'll vertex snap it. It's constrained in the Y, so I'll just select in the middle here to unconstrain it and hold V again and middle mouse drag. So I'm going to unhide the polygon so I can see where the hips control needs to be constrained to. I want to go into the control vertex option here and turn off the joint selection here from the top, so that I can select the vertices of this curve. I'm just going to bring that forward to help it make a little more sense to us when we're trying to control it. With that done, I'm going to switch in and out of a component mode to get back to object mode, I'm going to rename this to Hips_CON, now we need to make a COG Con. Let's make a new circle for this, and let's drag it up here. I'm going to turn off the polygons one more time, and I'm going to vertex snap this to the joint, we need to make this look a little bit different because it's in the same place as the hips. A good way is to just make it bigger. That will be the primary one that we're going to want to select every time that we select it. So I'm just going to make this one slightly larger, and now if we show the polygons, we can see that indeed that's probably going to be the one we're going to select the most, because the Hip_CON, is really a secondary control. I'm going to constrain the joint here to the Hip_CON, I'm just going to turn back on joint selection, I'm going to select the main Con and then the COG joint and just parent constrain that. Before I do that, actually need to zero this out, that's always the practice we want to try to follow and do that for the hip control as well. Just hitting "G" to redo the last command that I did, which was freeze transformations. I'm just going to name this COG_CON. Now with a selected, select the COG joint and we can constrain it with parent constrain. If we just test that real quickly, and I can just zero or make that a one, accidentally scaled it just a little bit. We can see that it will follow now, and it will rotate everything. Now we just need the hips to control the hip joint there. We're going to do that by selecting the Hip_CON again, just like we've done. For this one, what I'm going to do is I'm going to only constrain the orientation so that we make sure that we stay on model. I don't want to translate the hips. Well, on second thought, this is kind of a cartoon character, so it might not be as important to standard model, let's just go ahead and do both, parent and orient or point and orient. So we'll do a parent. Let's go to constrain and parent, and now we can actually move this joint and rotate it as well without it effecting the spine. Now if we were to move this, it's not going to move the bottom half, a quick way to do that is actually to constrain this, and or group it. The quickest way is just a group it, sorry, to parent it. When one moves, the other moves. That's definitely one way. Visually I don't like seeing that they're both selected like this. When I select something, I want to know that's all I'm selecting, because if I do this and I select both of them, it's hard to tell that's what I've done. I like to do parent constraints, even though it makes for a few more nodes here, that's just my preference. You can either parent it or you could do a parent constraint to a group of the Hip_CON which is kind of my default for the reasons I've described. I'm going to do what I'm familiar with and going to parent constrain to the CON here, and then I'm going to try to keep this organized and put all of this under the CON group in the outliner. Anytime that I do anything on my rigg, I always want to test it and make sure it's doing what I expect it to do. So I'm going to do that for everything again and make sure everything is scaling as I expect it to, the hips have their own control and I can move them. It looks like everything is working well, I'm going to change these overrides and then we'll be done. So we go down to enable overrides, I want to change this to a yellow. I don't really know, we could do another yellow. It's really up to you how you want to color these things. In the next lesson, we'll continue rigging this and maybe look at finishing up the spine and the head, and then we'll move on to creating spaces for our hands so that they can move with the body or the world. Thanks for watching. 22. Bones Spine CONs: In this lesson, I'm going to create the controls for the spine and the head. The same process is going to be followed through with the clavicles here, as well as the fingers. Let's take a look at what we're going do. We basically need to constrain the joint to a con. Let's create a con by grabbing a circle and then just vertex snapping it to the joint. Let me turn off the polygon. When the vertex snap it'll choose the joint to vertex snap two instead of the con, or rotate this 90 degrees so that we can see it from the side. Then I'm going to rename this Spine1_CON, I'm going to duplicate it twice and just change these names. Then I'm going to vertex snap these to the spine joints above it. If we were to constrain the cons as they are now, constrained the joints to the cons, each individual joint would rotate, but it wouldn't have this overall effect of rotating together because their children and parents relationship here. We need to reflect that in the cons themselves. We need to parent each one to the one below it, so that similarly, when we rotate the cons, they're all going to rotate together. Now that we have them in place, let's actually go to component mode up here. Let's click this little button and let's select all of the control vertices here, and we'll just slide them back. Then let's scale them down. If scaling down doesn't work for you just to make sure you're in Component mode here. Let's hold on R and go to Component mode, that way you can scale each one down individually. Let's go back to Object mode by clicking the button up here, and now we can just constraint each one to each joint to the con. I'll select each con and constrain it to the con. Before I constrain them, I want to make sure I'm freezing the transformations as well. Let's freeze transforms, and each one should be fine above that. Now I can select the con and a constrain. Now we select the spine cons, I can rotate the entire spine, if we have all these selected, I can also isolate it, each spine joint. But typically when I'm animating, which we'll get into in another lesson, and part of this course, I'm selecting all the cons together. Now we have the spine done. Let's put that into the con group. The other thing we want to make sure is that the spine relationship maintains and you can see when we dropped it in there, because we had them all selected. It actually on parented them. We just want to select the top one and now I'm drag that in, and now that's properly in there. The other thing we want to make sure is test the entire [inaudible]. You can see that the joint's no longer follow. We need to make sure that the spine con group is constrained to the cogs. They all follow the COG as the joints should be doing or where before we are creating these CONS. Let's group these command G, and I'll just call this Spine _ CON_GRP. I'm going to select the cog and command click this Spine_CON_GRP in the outliner and Parent, constrain that. Now you can see that they do indeed follow, and everything works as we would expect it. Thanks for watching this lesson and the next one we're going to do the same thing for the shoulders and the fingers. Then we're going to move on to discussing how to create different spaces for the hands. Thanks for watching. 23. Bones Shoulder Fingers: In this lesson, we're going to follow the same procedure we just did for the spine. We're going to do that for the shoulders here as well as each one of the fingers. Let's create cons for the shoulder. We can create another circle. It's vertex now up to the joint holding down V, middle mouse drag. Let's turn on the polygon so we can see where the model is, so we can make sure that we are going to put this in a place that we can actually select it. Let's hide the polygons again real quickly and let's turn on the component mode here. Let's move this over. Actually, let's rotate it before we do the component mode so that we can make sure that it's a 90 degrees. Let's go to 90 degrees, and now, let's go into component mode, and just move all of these over because we want to leave the pivot in the same place for the shoulder, but we want to be able to select the con over here. Let's turn back on that. We can get an idea of where the shoulder con should be. That looks pretty good. I'm going to go back into object mode and then I'm going to duplicate this and then turn off polygon so that I convert tech snap it to the joint. Holding down V, middle mouse drag, I'm going to rotate this around in 180 degrees so it's in the same place. Then I'm going to freeze the transformations on both of these. I'm going to go to modify, freeze transforms, select the other one, hit G, and I'm going to rename this Left_Shoulder_CON. Cool. Now, we can constrain these joints to the cons themselves. Let's select the con and then I'll select the joint and go to the constrain menu over here and let's parent it. The same thing for this one. Now when we rotate this, the shoulder should follow. We could also move it around if we wanted to, but we probably won't do that very much since that's anatomically inaccurate unless your shoulder is out of socket. Let's do the drawing overrides very quickly. Let's make the blue and we'll make this one red. Let's make sure it's following the rig. Let's go down to these cons. Let's first put it in a con group and then let's move the cog here. Yeah, we can see it's not following. We want it to follow this top-most one here. We can actually just put both of these in a group together since they are going to both follow that top spine. I'm going to command group those and I'll call that a Shoulder_CON_GRP. I'll select this top joint con here and then I'll command click the shoulder con group. Let's just parent constrain that. Now, when we rotate this, the shoulder cons should follow along with the top spine. Cool. Let's do the same thing for some of the fingers over here. The fingers are going to be a little more unique in that if we try to constrain a con to it, we're going to get negative values. Let's just do that real quick to show you what I'm talking about. I'm going to turn off the polygons so we can vertex snap this nerves' curve there. We're going to do what we've been doing where we modify freeze transformations and then we're just going to parent constrain the joint to the curve. When we do that, now when we rotate the curve, you can see we're getting negative values. Why is that? Well, the axes of the curve is not correct relative to the joint orientation. If we look at the joint and we delete this constraint from the outliner that we just made, we can see that it rotates in the positive axes. We need to figure out a way to transfer this position to the curve. Let me show you one way that I found to do that. If you're not worried about having negative values, then that's fine. This is very particular thing to want to make sure is correct. It's not all that important. But as we're learning, we might as well try to dive a little deeper into this stuff. I'm just going to hit command G without anything selected. It's going to create an empty group which is going to be called a null. Let's constrain that group without an offset so it jumps over to this joint. I'll hit apply. Now, you can see that we have all of these values of the joint in that group. If we delete that constraint now, and we create a curve, and just for speed's sake, let's do the same thing, let's get the curve over- 24. Bones Hands To Shoulders: In this lesson, we're going to fix an issue that we have when we move the shoulders here with hands. If we rotate the shoulders up, we can see the shoulders are moving as we expect them to. But that it's just stretching the hand, the hand is not moving with it. We would expect it to move at least in this direction. We would want the hand to go with that and go over here. Maybe not rotate up with the arm. That'd be something different, but just at least be drawn inward when this is rotated up. So to do that, we need to point constrain the group of this, the left-hand group. Remember why we're always creating empty groups above controllers is for this exact reason. Just as an example, let's just say we parent constrain that real quick. The problem with that is, if we rotate this, it's going to go all the way with it. That's going to be a big problem in animation. If we just want to make small adjustments in the shoulder and the the hand is going crazy and following it from this large of a distance and rotating like that. When you think about how you're going to be animating it, you have to build your legs based around that. So I just want to show you why we're not going to do a parent constraint. We can try that real quick just to show you it doesn't do anything. So if we do a point constrain, it doesn't do anything because if you think about what's happening, we're just changing rotation values. Point constraint is all about translation. This is pivoting from over here. The point itself is not moving anywhere. If we moved it, it would go. But we're going to mostly be rotating the shoulders. So we want to pick a point that's right here for the hand to follow. So we need to create that ourselves. So let's undo all this. Let's create a locator and call it the Left Shoulder Point Constrain, something that makes sense. Now let's vertex snap that to this pivot point, this part of the shoulder and we're going to parent it to this cone, someone hit 'P'. So now when we rotate this, we have a point that we can use to add a point constraint from this hand. So let's select that locator. I'm just going to copy that for now so we can duplicate that here in a second. I'm going to select the locator then I'm going to command select the group and choose point constraint. Now when we do it, the hand floats and keeps the orientation it had had with the arm, but it will follow the shoulder now. That's pretty cool. So let's do that with the other side. I'll see you next lesson where we will add another level of constrain to the hand where we can get it back to world if we wanted to. I'll see you the next lesson. Thanks for watching. 25. Bones Hand Spaces: In this lesson, we're going to continue to add different spaces for the hand to follow. Currently we have it to follow the shoulder, which is going to be a default setting. Let's add one so that when we rotate the spine, the arms will follow the spine rotation. When we go back and forth, the arms would swing around and they wouldn't be stuck going in the same direction that they are here. Let's get to the low cares first and let's just hide those for cleanliness. I'll just go Control H to hide those since we don't really need those. If we ever want to get back to them, we can just frame up the left shoulder con and scroll that down. We can see those locators right there. What we want to do is add a constrain to this same group. Let's scroll down and let's select the top spine joint first, and then let's go to the left-hand group and create a new constraint. I'll go to parent constraint. If you can tell, we actually have this point constrain here, and now we have a parent constraint node. We have two, we have this one and we have that one, and they're both activated. On the group itself, we have this blend parent going on and we can just ignore that for now. Let's take a look and see what happens when we rotate this now, we can see it does indeed follow the spine. That's pretty good. If we rotate this shoulder, we can see that it does not work. That's not good. We want to make sure that they're both working in conjunction with each other. We're going to need to add another group above this hand. Let's undo that so that we get rid of that constrain. Great. Let's add another group of this. I'm just going to type in group again, so it will be in the same spot. It looks like it's trying to go half and half between, maybe something that was in the group. It was probably the constraint. When you type in group, it's trying to find the center pivot of whatever you have selected. Because the constraint needs to be said that it's somewhere in the world and that's at zero zero, the group that we just made is trying to split the difference. We can just hold down D and V and just snap that back to the hand. It doesn't really matter, but it's just nice to have everything around about where it should be. Let's just say left and chest group, and let's make the constraint on this group. Let's go to the spine joints, let's select the left-hand chest, and we'll go to constrain parent. Again, we select this con, it should rotate around, it's fine, and of course, now the pull vector is following a little bit just because we did appoint constraint, it's not going to rotate around. But anyway, you have tradeoffs, you have to pick your battles on functionality here. Now when we use this, it should still follow. That's why we need to hierarchies here in the left hand group so we can separate the constraints out into two different groups. The one thing that we need to do is add a follow group here on the cons, so it's easy to control what is following. Let's go to the channel box here and we'll go edit, and we'll say add attribute, and we'll go to a Enum. Instead of these colors here, we can type in whatever we want. Let's just say shoulder, and then let's say chest, and let's add another one. Just click anywhere in here and then we can say world. Cool. Let's add a name up here, and we'll just say follow, and let's say add. Now we have this follow item over here, and we need to add a set driven key to this so that from this controller we can control which constraints are being activated. Right now, let's figure out what we have. We we're following the chest and the shoulder. Anytime that we're following the chest, I think we also need to be following the shoulder. Those would work together. The shoulder would always be on if the chest is on, it's not one or the other, they would always be on together. Let's just call this the chest follow. We'll go to chest, we will go to set driven key like we've done before, and we'll load the driver, we'll go down to follow, and then let's select the constraints. I'll go to this constraint first and load driven, and let's go down to the attribute that actually controls the constraint here. We can see that it's set at one, so we know it's on. Let's key that. Now we can see this little self-driven keyframe pop-up. Then let's go down to the chest constrain, load that as a driven, and go down to the spine three, this is one advantage of naming everything as we can very clearly see where the constraint is on this attribute. Let's key that as well, we can see that pop-up here, we know it's keyed. We now know that with this controller, the follow chest is as it should be. Let's go to the shoulder now and we're going to want to turn off the chest. Let's select the chest. Let's go to that and hit zero and key that. Now let's go to the shoulder and we'll load the driven. Go back to that attribute here and we'll leave that on one and hit key. Cool. Now we have two different options. Now we have the shoulder, so the spine shouldn't affect it following or not, and that's the case, but it is still following the shoulder here, which is what we want. Now we have this nice control. We can go back and forth without having to go deep into the rig and figure out where are the constraints are in and all that stuff. It lives right here on the con, where we want it to be. Let's do the final one of the world's space. Let's switch this to world. Then let's go to the driven and let's turn off the point constraint of the shoulder here. It will go to zero and let's key that. Just for good measure, even though this one is already off, let's just load it as a driven and key that as off as well. It should already be off. I'm not sure why it's not, it's a little suspicious. I hit that to zero and I key. The hand should now stay where it is and that's what it's doing. Cool. Now we have a controller that we can affect the different space that we want it to be in. The only thing to keep in mind is, if we start to animate this, it's probably going to jump around. We just need to typically stick with one just to make our lives a little easier when we're animating. I'm going to do this to the other side and then I'll see you in the next lesson where we will continue to finish out this rig. Thanks for watching. 26. Bones Head Space: In this lesson, we're going to create the headspace and I'm going to explain why that's important. Because similar to the shoulder setup that we created, we're going to create a setup like that for the head. If we look at the controller I made between the previous lessons, I'll just continue the same methodology that we use on the spine and I've created a neck control here and it rotates the neck, but we need to make sure that it is parented to the spine. Otherwise, let's just turn off the Polygons so you can see the joints. It's not following the spine, so we need to parent this to the spine. But if we did that for the head which I created a con here and I move the control vertices up above the head and the skull so it's easy to select. I've placed the pivot right at the joint center here. If we would a parent the head to the neck like we've done with the rest of the spine, then the rotation of the head would be dictated by that because it's a child. If we bent the spine over, the character would be looking at the ground, but we didn't rotate the head to be looking at the ground. What if we want to keep the head rotated up? To do that, we need to create a space for this. We can't use parenting and we need to use constraints. Let's unparent this with Shift P and let's constraint the head here to a point up here. We want it to always follow the shoulder. If we were to point constraint to this, it wouldn't matter because the point itself was never moving or rotating the neck and it's actually the point above it, the joint here that's moving. Let's create another locator like we've done with the shoulders and let's vertex snapping here to the neck or really the top of the head joint here. We can just call that the head locator constraint and let's parent that to the neck hitting P. We can point constraint that because we do know that we always want the head itself to follow this point, but we don't want the head con, again, we don't want that to have all the constraints, so we need to create a group for it. We'll hit Command G and we will get the center pivot up here by holding down d and v and middle mouse dragging. We'll just call that the Head Con Group. We're going to constraint the Head Con Group with a point constraint to this locator. Let's select the locator then the Head Con Group and go constraint point. Now when we rotate the neck they should follow along, but you can notice that the head itself is keeping its upright orientation. Same thing if we rotate the spine all the way down. The head itself is going to be pointed upwards. You can see it's like a serving tray, like a waiter coming to the table. They don't want to spill everything out when they bend over and set it on your table, they want to keep the tray upright. That's a way to think of this and why that's important. Now let's create a space so that if we choose to have it to be that way that the rotation of the head follows the spine, we have that option. Let's create a new attribute here, will go to Add Attribute with con selected. We'll call this a follow as well and it'll be an Enum and we'll say body or world. Add those to it and hit Okay. Currently we're on world because it's staying upright, it's not following the body, the orientation isn't pulling the body. Let's choose World and then let's select the attribute here so that we can actually select Set Driven Key. You have to have an attribute selected to be able to set the set driven key. Let's load that in as the driver, hit follow. Then we need to create an orient constraint to this locator. Let's select the locator and go to head con, and go constraint, orient. Now what happens is it should follow the rotation of the spine and that's what's happening. Cool. Now we have that the head con is actually following the body. Let's change that back to body. Let's select the constraint over here and it's the Orient Constraint that we just made. Let's load that in as the driver, select the head locator constraint over here and let's set a key. Now let's go back to the Head Con, let's switch this back to World. I want to get to the actual con itself not the group, select World. Let's select the Orient Constraint again, so we can set that to zero. Basically turn that off and let's set a key there. Now it should be back to following the world space and staying upright. But if we want to switch it out now we have it on this control itself. We don't have to go hunting inside the outliner for the constraints. Now all we have to do is just to parent this into the Con and group here. I'm going to middle mouse drag that into the Con Group. Again, let's just double-check that everything's working. Every time we do something we need to make sure that scale and move and everything is still working. That appears to be the case. I'll see you in the next lesson where we will begin to parent and skin the actual geometry to the Rig. Thanks for watching. 27. Bones Skinning The Feet: In this lesson, we're going to begin skinning the model to the rig and skinning is a process by which, we parent the bones to the rig in several different ways. We can do straight parents, we're going to do constraints. But for skinning, that is actually a very specific term and there's entire menu up here just for skinning. We bind the geometry to the joints and we'll get into that a little bit later. But I want to start a little more simple first. Let's go back and let's go down to the feet. Let's start from the feet and move up along the body. When we look at the feet and we look at how we've set up the rig, it's pretty straightforward, it's pretty basic. We have two pieces that are going to move. For that reason, we can just parent this to the rig or to the joints itself. But we want to make sure that we choose the right joint remember, this joint that we made, that we have this individual control over. We want to make sure that we parent it to this joint, It's called [inaudible]. I can copy that and I can just hit "Zero" on this to zero back out and I can actually search for that in the outliner. If I paste that in and we should see something pop up. If it doesn't merely pop up, you can just toggle this down and if that wasn't already all the way down, a quick way to toggle the entire hierarchy is to hold down shift and click and that will toggle the entire thing. We can see that it's down here at the bottom. It's hard to see because it's round top and other joint, it looks like we don't have anything selected but if we use isolates select, we can see we do indeed have a joint selected. With this geometry selected, let's command-click in the outliner on that joint and hit "P". Now, if we move this control around, it's actually moving the geometry. We can test this out with the foot roll rig that we created as well. That it is indeed moving. Cool. We're basically going to follow that same method throughout the rest of the body. We can find these joints and parent the geometry to the corresponding joint. Now we did the rest of the foot and we have the foot role for the entire foot now. I'm just going to turn off the joints so we can see the geometry now a little bit better. Check that out. We actually have a geometry working and it's following along with the rig as we would expect it to. It's pretty cool. Now we seem to do that for the rest and we can go through here and hit "P". Select the child first and the parent hit "P" and then always kind like to check everything is working and the kneecap might be something, let's see if I add zero on the top joint or the bottom joint. Let's pair both of those up and see how the knee responds, we might need to do something special with that, let's find out. In general, we are going to need to fix the knee. We might need to do this, as it might come up a couple of times in this rig and there are a couple of different ways that we could solve this problem. Where the joints, the model is crashing into the joint above it. When the angle gets too close together like that. Let's go ahead and fix that. I'll see you next lesson. Thanks for watching. 28. Bones Moving Joints Fix: In this lesson, we're going to fix the issue we ran into. In the previous lesson we were learning about skinning and binding the geometry to the joints where the bones themselves were running into each other here on the knee. Let's think about why that's actually happening. If we take a look at our leg and we look at it from a profile view on the side, I'm just holding down "Space-bar" left clicking and then dragging and dropping my mouse over the right camera there. If we take a look, let's consider what we've created here. We created a joint whose pivot point is out in front, it's out here. If you think about this like the hinge on a door or something, and this bottom bone was the door, it's going to swing from this pivot. This is going to swing around this way. You can see pretty quickly that this edge is going to smash into this one. Let's think about what if we brought this pivot in? We brought it closer to the middle. When it swings, it will take a much greater distance of swing for it to, the bones to be able to hit each other. That's how we're going to fix this. We're going to move these joints in. Hopefully that helps you think about how and where to place the actual joints themselves for their pivot points to work with the model. Cool. Let's go to the "Skin" menu up here, and we'll go down to "Move Skinned Joints." When we click that, it looks like nothing happened. But if you look over here on the left, you can see the icon that's selected over here is the last tool used, but it's also the current one. Because if we went to something like this now that's blue. So we know the blue is what we have selected. This is the "Move Skinned Joints" tool. But it looks similar to the "Move" tool, but it's specific to joints. So let's click and drag, so we have both joints, the left and right knees. Then let's make sure that we are in the world setting because we want to push this directly backward in world space. Let's click and drag both of those joints back. As we do that you can see the geometry begins to move. Let's unparent those first. I'll just go up here and click the "Geometry" and hit "Shift P" and do that for both sides. Now we go back into the right view and we select the joints and deselect the geometry here. Oh, I think that's still parented there, so I unparented it. I'm clicking and dragging both the knee joints, the left and the right. Now I can get back to that tool just by simply clicking this icon over here, the last used tool. If I hold down "W" and make sure I'm in world space. Then now I can move both of these joints back. I don't want to go past 180 degrees. They should still be in front of vertical because otherwise the joints will start rotating and flipping around. They're not going to be sure which way is forward. If we go past a 180 degrees, some wonky things could happen. I'm just going to leave this right in front of vertical, and I'm just thinking vertical. Look at these grid lines. I don't want to go pass this vertical. I don't want the joint to go past this imaginary vertical line from one joint to the other. Cool. Now let's reparent these pieces of geometry here and take a look at what we've made, the changes we've made. I'm just going to parent this joint to the bottom one. Sorry, I'm going to parent the patella bone, is what it's called, to the lower leg bone, the shin bone. Now with that change, you can see we can move the leg up a lot higher before they start to run into each other. Looks pretty cool. That might be enough for us. Let's turnoff the joints so we can see. I'm going to go to a "Show" and turn off joints here. That doesn't really bother me as much as the other one was very obvious that they were breaking, going into each other. We could still maybe do some fixes here. But I think for the most part that this is working pretty well now. Now all we have to fix is this patella bone. The way that we can do that, there are several different ways we could do that. But what I think I would like to do is to do a set driven key. I'm going to click any of the attributes over here so I can access the set driven key menu here from the "Edit" menu. And now I'm going to load that as the driven. It's loaded as the driven. I'm just going to select all of these attributes here because I'm not sure which ones I'm exactly going to effect yet. Okay let's think about what we want to drive this, just so that we understand how to think about this. Sure, the controller, is what's controlling that joint. If we use this as the driver, what would actually be the driver? If you start to think about this, because it could bend in all different types of directions. It'll be much more difficult to use this as a driver. Let's think about the joint. Let's show the joint. When we move the foot control, what's happening to the joint? The joints aren't actually moving positions. They're simply just rotating. They get a different rotation value. Let's have it be straight. Let's look at this bone. We basically have zeros on the rotations. There's this little 1.766 whatever. But basically the rotations are zero. Now let's lift this up. Let's take a look at the rotations again. Now we have a big value and rotate Z. We could use just this one value to use as the driver for the set driven key instead of the controller, which would be very difficult to use that as the driver. I hope that makes sense why we're choosing the bone instead of anything else. Let's load that in as the driver. Let's choose rotate z. We'll set a key. Now lets move up the leg, the foot rather to whatever height you'd like to. I like to go the max, the most change in the shortest amount of time. Then all I have to do is just move this in the position that I'd like it to be in. Somewhere in here, to stay in front of the knee joint and maybe push it in a little bit. Now I'll hit "Key" there. So when we move this up and down, now the patella bone joint stays in front of the knee. It's pretty cool. Go ahead and do that for the other leg. In the next lesson we will move up to the rest of the body and finish skinning the model. Thanks for watching. 29. Bones Skinning Spine Weights: Let's tackle our first actual binding of geometry to the joints, what is known as skinning in this lesson and we're going to do that on the spine. But first, let's start from where we left off and we have the legs done. We need to get the hips done. The hips are going to be pretty easy because we have our own hip joint here, which is controlled by its own controller. You can see that we can start to play with her rig a little bit there. All we need to do is simply just parent that to the hip joints so we can select the child first and then the parent hit P. We have the hips will move along with the legs. It can be very distracting once you get to this point, to just start playing with the rig like this, everyone does it. If you get distracted for 15 minutes and you just do that, that is very normal. Let's talk about actually binding the geometry to the joints here because we have a lot of spine joints. How do we approach this? The easiest way for us to do this is going to be to combine the mesh of the spine joints. They are not individual pieces anymore. Now that we have this done and we like were there add we can do that. Let's define them. Let's select one and hit "F" in the outliner so we can find all the spine joints here. Just going to Shift select all of them and go to the modeling menu up here. Go to Mesh combine. They're all one piece and we have all this nasty history here of all these groups so we begin with the spines still selected go to "Delete by type", go to "History". We got rid of all those nasty groups, now we hit "Spine". Let's begin selecting the joints that we want to include on this binding. You want the hips because we have this little bone down here, the tailbone basically that is below this root joint and here this COG joint. I'm just going to open up the channel box here so you can see the names of things. We can see it's constrained to the controller what we would expect and all that stuff. But just so you can see the names here. We could start here, but we're going to leave out this hip control that we just added to the hips. I think this tailbone to follow this hip rotation here. We need to include this joint to start with the hips. Then we can hit "Q". We get this select tool and Shift click and drag and select each joint up the chain. As the bottom one turns white, you know you selected the next one. Everything up to this one has been selected. It can be a little confusing on what you have selected so just make sure to pay attention to that. We basically want to select all the joints that are included in the spine. We don't want to select the head joint because we'll do that later and that's going to be just for the head. We'll leave that one. The last thing we select is this geometry. Let's go to the rigging menu here and go to "Skin" and look at the "Bind skin options". Let's walk through this. There's a lot here, but it's really not that complicated. The only thing you really need to look at is what we're going to bind to? We don't want to bind to the hierarchy, we want to make sure we bind only to the selected joints because in the hierarchy there's the shoulders, the clavicles, the arms. There's a lot of things in the hierarchy but we just want to make sure we're binding to the selected joints. That's why we made that selection. Then all of this default stuff is pretty good out of the box. There's no real reason to get into this stuff. It's a lot of crazy math and it's not worth getting into from a beginner level. I rarely change that stuff. Normalize the weights, blah, blah, blah, that's fine. We distribution is fine. The next big thing, really, the second big thing you want to look at his max influences and that means how many joints do we want to be able to influence a vertices? Do we want, let's say the neck joint up here, to possibly influence this bottom vertices. Absolutely not. That makes no sense. We don't want five joints be able to influence one vertices. I don't even know when that would make sense. But we want to reduce this. We really just want two. If you look at the distribution of joints the distance between them dictates how many influences you're going to want, I would think. You could do like two or maybe even three would make sense but I'm just going to stick to two for now. That's really all you want. The resolution is basically the size of the weight maps, I believe. We can just crank that up a little bit to 512 pixels. Yeah, then we're ready to go. Let's just hit "Apply". It's going to think for a second and then it's going to de-select everything. We can close this. Now select all of our spine controls here and take this for a spin and it looks like it's working pretty darn good. We actually have deformations happening on the geometry. This is a totally new thing. We haven't done this before. We haven't done binding of geometry to joints so now we get to see how the geometry deforms along with the joints deformation. We get these hitches here. That's okay because it's the extreme levels here. Also this is something to think about, the density of joints. This is a trade-off. For a better faithful interpretation and deformation here we would need a lot more joints, but the trade-off is, how many controls do you want to use when you're animating? Do you want to keep track and animate 10 controls in the spine? Probably not. That's maybe overkill. When you're animating, you're going to want to not enjoy that. This is another example of what to think about when you're rigging. How many joints do we really need? How many controls do I want to give the animator? Will they hate me if I give them a ton of controls and it's useless because they're going to use them altogether? Is there another way to get around this type of wonky deformation? Actually there is, and that's something that we're going to cover in the next lesson. Now that we've bound the geometry, let's take a look at what that is actually doing behind the scenes and how we can affect that. We can see that there's the sharp edges here when we deform this in a drastic way. But what's really dictating the influence over the geometry. If we look at the tailbone, it's not totally moving one-to-one with the joint. If this was moving one to one, this should be pointing over here. It should be pointing in the same axis as the red x rotation here. But it's lagging behind. Let's try to figure out why that is. There is something called weights. That dictates how a vertices is going to follow a joint. Remember when we did the maxim influences at two so we know that only two joints can act on a vertices. Let's open up this thing that we can actually see what I'm talking about. Let's go to "Skin" and with the spine selected, let's go to "Paint skin weights". This is another big piece of the puzzle here when we're talking about binding joints. When I click that, you can see now we have this black white representation. We can actually change that down here to use a color ramp if we want. This also shows why it's important to name your joints because now we can see which joint are actually selecting here. This is very important. I'm just going to go back to black and white for a second. I'm going to change the size of the brush. The brush is pretty big. I'm going to go down here to stroke and go, yeah, 0.2. Yeah, that looks pretty good. There's a lot going on here, and as is typical with Maya, it's not as complicated as it looks. We have the mode is paint, the paint operations replace, and the value we're going to paint is one. We're going to say 100 percent follow bones hips. This is a joint we have selected. This is the joint we are affecting the geometry on. If we start painting here, you can see it turns a brighter white. That means 100 percent. It means this thing is going to follow 100 percent this joint that we have selected. I'm going to paint this entire little lower tail bone joint because I know I want it to follow the hip joint 100 percent. It's a whole solid piece. Let's just paint this whole thing, just clicking around and painting it. We can also get a more accurate, more faithful look at what the paint values are by going into the color ramp, we can see now that white is going to be 100 percent and some of this is still red. We could really go over this a bunch of times and make sure it's actually 100 where the other black and white map wasn't really giving us that. It was just giving us a larger interpretation of these values. That's good enough, I think, for our purposes. Let me go back into our manipulating. I just hit "W" to get the tool up here, the move tool and hit "E" to get to rotation. Now, check this out. It moves 100 percent. It's falling exactly where that hip joint is moving and that might not be what we want because now you can see at this intersection, it's pretty rough. It's starting to crash in and deform a little bit. We might not want it to be 100 percent, but you get the idea now and why this is important and how we can affect the weights all along the spine. Let's hop back in here for one second. I'm going to use the last use tool option over here to get back and from the bones hips, the other thing that you can do, which is pretty nice, is go to smooth and then just flood and watch this over here. I'm just going to hit "Flood". This is not a good example. I think. Typically what will happen is it will smooth out these hard edges. Let me find a better example here. Let's go to the COG here, and let's see if that'll just happen by default on the default values. Yeah, everything looks like it's smoothed quite a bit. We have the paint tool. Let's go to replace. I'm just going to do that. Now we have 100. It's pretty harsh. It's not a smooth edge. Let's go to smooth and then hit "Flood". You can see what the flood tool does. It just softens those edges out. That can be very, very useful when you're painting and it's hard to get precisely what you're looking for. You can also of course paint that on. But yeah, all this stuff looks like it's already really smooth anyways. It's going to be harder to see that change here. But that is the Paint Skin Weights tool. In the next lesson we're going to take a break from this rig and look at another rig and how the paint skin weights work on more traditional human rig and how to do pose space deformations. Thanks for watching. 30. Pose Space Deformations: In this lesson, we're going to learn about Pose Space Deformation. But first I just wanted to show you a more typical example of using Skin Paint Weights to affect the model. I'm going to select the joints as we know we need to do, and go to our custom menu and select the hierarchy of it. Then select the "Geometry" and go to "Skin", "Bind Skin" and just use the default that we had before. It'll think for a second. Now we can take a look at the weights that we get just out of the box. For this example, I'm just going to be manipulating the joints themselves instead of the cons are true we would do if we were properly rigging this buffer speed. I'm just going to use the joints so we can see that it's pretty messed up and unusable. Let's take a look at a pose. Let me just, I'll hit "S" on my keyboard to set a key to make sure that we save the default pose because we're using the joints, we don't actually have a zeroed out con that we can use and know that if we go to zero, that it'll go back to the default pose. If I were to start manipulating this and then try to get back to default, I wouldn't really know where that would be because it's not zeroed out. That's just gives you an example of why zeroing out your controllers are important if you ever want to get back to the default pose. Let me just scrub forward here and then I will crank this shoulder up. You can see because I have the Auto Key on over here that it automatically set a key for me because it was keyed once, then at anytime it's moved on another frame, it'll automatically key it. We basically have this range and I'm just going to drop the timeline down so we can scrub the whole timeline here. We basically have this arranged. Now we can work on the skin, painting the skin weights. With the "Geometry" selected, I'm going go to "Skin" and go down to the "Paint Skin Weights" and nothing happens. We have the X on the brush because we need to go to the Tool Settings first to get them. Now we get back to this familiar scene where we have the black and white and we need to see the shoulder. Let's scrub down into the named joints and go to the "Left Shoulder". Now, instead of going back and forth between the "Rig" and the "Paint Skin Weights" tool. Now all we have to do is just scrub the timeline and we get this range of motion. If we didn't do this, then it would be a major pain to have to constantly switch between these manipulators, putting it in a position that we want it. Then go back to the paint skin weights tool, then select the joint, then go to work on it and it would be a major pain. This is a much easier way to deal with that. Let me just delete that key frame because we don't want that. I'm just right-clicking on it and going to "Delete". So I'm going to select the "Paint Skin Weights" tool and the "Geometry". We need to have the "Geometry" selected for that to register. I'm going to get back to the shoulder. Now you can see why it's important to set those couple of keys, those two key frames. Now we can just stay here and go to different ranges of motion and affect the "Rig" and the "Painted Skin" Weights. I'm going to go to this most jacked up pose here and make sure on "Replace" and let's take the value to one. As soon as I start painting, you can see it has a huge effect and it moves the vertices in a pretty big direction. This is just really rough just to show you how the tools work. I'm going to go back to smooth and then flood this. You can see how it greatly smooths out this region. It makes it much more smooth. Let's deal with the arm pit here. We can actually take the "Replace" tool and actually go to a value of zero to erase these values. But the opposite of what you'd expect to happen is happening where you can see that instead of going back into the body, these vertices are going further away. They're going up to the bicep. That gives us an indication that when we're painting a zero on this, it has to replace that value with something and it's replacing it with a joint that is already having some kind of influence on it. Now it's just giving it a greater influence. The more we tell it the shoulder is zero, it has to replace it with something. What my guess says is it saying the bicep, now the bicep is getting more influence. Now we can go to the "Left Arm Bone" and see if that's the case. We can see that is, so now we can actually do a zero on this. What you'd expect is happening now, the Armpit is going back into the body. This is one way to troubleshoot and see how the joints are affecting the skin and the weights. Now we have a decent situation here and we can smooth this out as well. I'll click smooth and flood this out. But the Shoulder is still a little wonky. There's a very interesting tool that we can use called "Pose Space Deformation". I'm going to get out of the tool settings here. With this arm posts still up here, we can get an idea of how bad the deformation is. The Shoulder should definitely not look like this. Let's go back to the "Default Pose" and let's select the joint that's going to be influencing that area, which is the "Shoulder" or this "Upper Arm Joint". Let's go to "Deform", "Pose Space Deformation". For this tool to work, we want to make sure that we actually go into our Windows Settings and Preferences Plug-in manager, make sure the Plug-in is loaded for this. I'll click on that and then you can scroll down. It's probably near the bottom. It's called poseinterpolator.bundle. You want to make sure these are checked on loaded and auto loaded. That will make this tool actually work. We need that first, let's open up the Pose Editor and we get this new window. Lets play around with this. Let's turn on the Pose Editor and say, "Create a Pose". By Default I don't have the neutral poses being created. That might not be the case for you. I did that on mine and I'm having a hard time finding how to get back to the Default. But basically the Default should be that it will create neutral poses here. If it doesn't, you can just do that from "Poses", "Add Neutral Poses". Now we have a neutral pose. It's basically saying, "Okay, this is home-base. This is where the headquarters is, where we're going to always refer back to. This is a good pose." This is the Default Neutral Pose. So let's scroll forward and find the jacked up pose, which is up here. Now we can create a pose to fix this. It's basically going to do all of this set driven key stuff we've learned. It's basically going to do that on deformation level. It's going to set up all that stuff behind the scenes that we don't have to touch any of that stuff. Let's create a pose with the joint selected will go to "Poses", "Add Pose", and open up the Option box. All that's fine. It'll say "Add Pose". Now we get the option to name the pose. I'll just say ShoulderFix is the name of this. This is an important deformation order thing here. If we say automatic, it may or may not choose the right one. This is a very important menu. You might need to play around with this because when I have been testing this, I get some very undesirable and useless results when I choose the wrong one. But in general, the way you want to think about this is, what is the order of deformations that I would like. I would like number 1, for the bones to deform the geometry. That's number 1. Number 2, I want to correct that. I want to correct that deformation so that has to happen after. We need to choose something that's like post or after. I've figured out that for this example after works. I'm going to say "Create Pose". Now we get this edit button is turned on, it's red and we can see it's named after the joint. What this means is, isn't currently with this edit button on, we can select the Bound Mesh to that joint and effect it and change it. It'll remember it based on the pose of this joint that's affecting it. I'm in the "Sculpting" Tools and I'm just going to quickly try to fix this a little bit. I'm going to bring up the shoulder or bring in the arm pit. This is going to be very rough. I'm just going to go in here and hold down "B" and middle mouse drag. Try to smooth this stuff out. Just a touch, bring up the center. Same thing on the sides here. Just want to bring all this stuff up. Then I can go through and smooth it real quick, holding down "Shift". If you've watched the first part of this course, you will have some knowledge of this Sculpting Tools. For the most part, this looks about a million times better already just in that couple of seconds of messing with this pose. What we can do is save this by turning off editing here and click this button. I'm going to say stop editing when I click that. What it's going to do as we scrub back through, it should remember all of those changes we made. Anytime that the arm gets back into that pose, it's going to fix it and it feels like there's muscle here. It feels like there's a trapezius. Forgot what this muscle is and the deltoid here. It feels more fleshy and that this is organic and there's things moving under the skin, muscles and bones. This is a really cool way to build in these deformations into the rig. That they'll happen every time you animate the character and knows poses. Cool. Thanks for watching this video and in the next lesson we'll jump back into finishing up rigging bones. We'll have a animatable character that we can use in the later part of this Course. Thanks for watching. 31. Bones Skin Body: All right. We're back and we're working on bones. We're just going to finish up some of the more simple parts, and then we're going to address an issue with the rotation of the forearm in the next video. In this one, what we can do is go ahead and I would encourage you to apply what you've learned from the pose space deformations. To do that to these spine joints and make them more rounded, right? When they're in these kind of bend over and bend back poses, you could go in here and say, make this be more of an arch instead of these very angular deformations. Here you can make that much more smooth with pose space deformations. Definitely encourage you to use what you've learned now and you could do that in both directions. You could really make this spine look a lot better and have the best of both worlds have very few controls, but also have nice deformations. Let's take a look at what else we have to do. We need to get the chest working with the ribs, if we take a look at the joints here, we can see that where these connect up with the spine, is the base of this joint and they all connect to this one. We can pretty easily just parent all of those to this one joint. I'm going to select all of these, and I'm actually going to hit F and the outliner because I'm pretty sure all the ribs, it's separated by left and right. We can choose both of those and then the sternum, just holding down the shift and clicking. Now we have everything and now we can shift click the last thing that we want to parent everything to and then hit P and it should all go under there. Now let's test that. Now it is indeed working and the sternum and the ribs are all following the spine. It's pretty cool. Nice. Now let's take a look at the collar bone and the scapula back here. I think we can just pretty easily parent those as well and test out that. We can see that it does indeed work pretty well, they all pivot from a good position and they don't crash into each other. That's looking pretty good. Let's do the same thing over here, and let's pretty easy parent on the bicep as well. The one thing that I would maybe consider is, let's see if we have the same thing. The problem with the knees that we had on the elbow here, let's see. We have the arm and indeed part of that forearm is crashing in If we bend it like this, you can see this big piece here crashes in. There's a couple of different ways we can resolve that. Let's finish parenting all this stuff and we'll get back to that. I'm going to parent those, let's make sure this is all working and then we can just parent of course, all of the respective finger joints to the bones here. I'll let you finish this out and in the next lesson, we're going to fix the forearm and will be pretty much almost done with this except for a few cool character stuff we're going to do for the face on the head. I'll see you in the next lesson, where we will finish up the body and then we will work on the head. Thanks for watching. 32. Fix Forearm Twist: In this lesson, we're going to fix two issues with the forearm. The first one is the same issue as the knee when we move the hand, we can see that this bone crashes in through the elbow. We need to adjust where the joint pivot is rotating from. Let's select both of these joints. We'll actually on parent all of the bones first so that they don't get all wonky and go everywhere. I'll hit Shift P after selecting them, which will on parent them. We're going to select both of these joints. I'm going to make sure I'm on the world move manipulator option here. I'm going to go to skin, move skinned joints. Now, we can see we have that tool selected and we can just move this pivot forward. Let's go to the Top View, Spacebar left-click Top View. Now, we can see a relationship, I'm looking from here to here, and we don't want to go on this side of that. If I was to draw a straight line from here all the way through to this joint. I don't want this middle joint to go pass that line. I need to stay on this top side of that line, that imaginary line. I'm going to drag these forward just until that point. Now, I can go back and parent all of these up again and test this out. Now, that we have been parented, I can select the hand control. You can see it works much, much better, and I think that is a reasonable amount of crashing on this rig to be able to put up with. I think that's fixed that issue. The second issue we want to address is the fact that when we rotate the wrist, if we select the hand control here, and we rotate the wrist, the forearm itself does not rotate. Take a second and look at your own forearm. Rotate your wrist. Rotate your risk just like I'm rotating this and look and feel of what your actual forearm bones are doing. This is called the radius and the ulna. You'll notice that they twist, that these two end joints are stuck, they are stuck to the either end of this hand bone. When the hand rotates, these should stay stuck to the ends of that. It twists around each other there. They kind of pivot from back here. Because these stay stationary, but these ends follow the hand. Let's create a rig that will do that. Let's think about it. We need to have something for these to follow. It can't follow the hand control because the pivot of the hand controls and between them, we need something that pivots is exactly where the center of these two ends are. We need to create something new for that to happen. Let's create two locators. Go to Create Locator. We can turn on this little option here. It says Snapped to Projected Center. I'm going to click that and with w, I'm going to middle mouse drag. Now, that I middle mouse dragging, its constantly trying to find the center of whatever object I middle mouse dragging in. I'm going to try to get it somewhere towards the end of the bone here. I think that's good. I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to middle mouse drag into the top center of this bone. Now, I'm going to name those radius_Aim actually and ulna_Aim. I'm going to parent those under the hand control here. I'm going to select that and hit P. Now, when we rotate this, we have to pivot points. Let me just turn off the polygons so you can see. We have two pivot points here that rotate with the hand con, that aren't in the center of it. That's very helpful, that's what we need. Now, let's take a look at what we can do to get these two constraint just to those points. If we're going to do like an orient or a parent constraint that's going to do the entire bone and we don't want that. We just want it to pivot from this end back here. We can turn off this centroid snap thing now. We wanted to pivot from back here and point towards those locators. We need to learn about a new constraint, that's called the aim constraint. It does exactly what you'd think it would do. I'm going to open this up, open the Option Box. Let's take a look at this real quick. Anytime you see three things like this, three empty boxes or three boxes with numbers in them, you can reasonably assume that it means this is X, the middle one is Y, and this is Z. You remember that based on the translate X, Y, and Z up here, always put these in that order. Whenever you're seeing it in a dialogue box. Of course, the rotation order that we learned about earlier, that's something totally different and we can set that order ourselves. But when you see it in a menu like this, you can reasonably assume this is X, this is Y, and this is Z, even though it doesn't say that here, that's what these three boxes indicate. What this is saying is the aim vector is one, it's in the positive X, X, Y, Z, so this is X. If we take a look at the bone and we see which way is pointing positive X, that is the arrow, the right arrow is pointing. That's correct. We want it to aim in that direction. The default is correct. The up vector is Y, positive Y. That's fine by me. That is pretty much all we need to make sure is oriented correctly. Let's select the locator first and then the joint. Let's hit Apply. Now, let's do the same for the other, we'll select the locator and then the joint and hit Apply. Now, let's rotate the risk on. We can see like I just get super excited over this simplest stuff. I love this stuff. We can see that this is actually rotating around each other and it looks pretty unbelievable how bones rotate. I just love stuff like this. Now, you can click a couple buttons and then you've recreated what a human does. That's pretty awesome. In the next lesson, we're going to address the head and how we can add a little more expression to that model. Thanks for watching. 33. Bones Head Blendshapes: In this lesson, we're going to clean up the head. The first one you take a look at the neck. If we click on the neck control and we rotate it around, we can quickly see that it doesn't follow the neck joint exactly 100 percent. This is a case where we need to go in and adjust the skin weights on this part of the geometry. The geometry selected will go into skin, paint skin weights, and we need to open up the tool settings here so we can see the bones neck, and we can pretty easily see that this is pretty grayed out and it's not a 100 percent, so we want to attribute this on a 100 percent to the neck joint. A quick way that we can do that, we get paint that, but let me show you one other way now that we have a little more knowledge of how things work, let me show you one new way. I'm going to go to the vertices option here by right clicking and dragging over the vertex. I'm going to select everything that I want to follow the neck joint, and want to undo that because it's trying to select the neck joint, so I'm going to click this little button that says don't select joints. I'm going to try that selection one more time. Now I'm going to go into the Windows, Component Editor, and if we drag this out, we can see smooth skins over here. What this is, is a table telling you exactly the influence of each joint on each of these vertex. We can see a vertex with a number, and it's basically saying it's 50-50 for most of these, we can scroll through and see all of them. But what we can do that is much quicker than painting, because we know we want them to be a 100 percent is just click the top one and then shift click the bottom one, and now type a one. Very quickly, now if we go back into the paint skin weights tool here and right-clicking going to object mode, if we go to the paint skin weights, which I can get to from the most recent used tool here, you can see now everything that I had selected is totally white because it's a 100 percent. Let me go into the tool real quick, and I'm just going to smooth out this neck joint so you can watch this gets smooth here over this one joint. Then I flood that, and now we've smooth that out. Let's go back to the con, the controller of the next joint and see that it is 100 percent controlled by that joint. That's pretty close to what we want, we can adjust this more, we could have that be a smoother transition, so it's not over one joint, but you get the idea. This is a pretty cool way to go through that spreadsheet, instead of visually having to paint things and not entirely now if it's a 100 percent on that one joint, we can just tell it, hey, you're 100 percent, you're 1.0 going to follow that joint. Now we have that resolved, let's actually now constrain the head geometry to this head control, because the way we rigged it up, we know the head control already works. Just the head geometry isn't hooked up to it yet. Let's find the head geometry and the outliner building f, and we can see there's also that plane back here, but let's make a group just for the head. I'm going to hit Command G and call this the head group. I'm going to constrain the group to the head controls, so I'll select the head control first and then the head group, and then go to Constrain, Parent Constrain. Now we can see that the head is indeed constrained to that control. Magical part of what we're going to learn in this video is about blend shapes. Now, what blend shapes are? Blend shapes are basically a way to deform geometry based on a sculpt. It's like pose space deformations, but it's a little different. Pose space deformations came after blend shapes. Blend shapes historically came first, and then they develop pose space deformations actually fairly recently. But blend shapes is kind of the original deformer, and its very useful still. Let's duplicate out the ahead, and we'll drag it over here. I'm just going to delete the eye mask here because we don't need that, we just want the head geometry. I'm going to drag this over and I'm going to shift to select the original head. I'm going to Deform and go down to Blend Shape, it's the first one. Open up the option box and let's name this Buffer BS for blend shape, and all of that's fine and we'll hit "Create". What this is, is basically going to be the intermediary between the original head and all of the blend shapes that we're going to make over here. They're going to filter through this one thing. We can turn this on, we can see now we have an input of Buffer BS over here on the inputs. We can click that and we can see has head 1, and that's the name for the geometry, this is head 1. We can turn that from a zero to a one, some middle mouse drag and the view-port and turn up the one. Watch what happens just real quick so you can get an idea of what this is. I'm going to select some vertices and hit B, and I'm going to yank them around. Now you can see that it affects the geometry. Why is this important? Because it looks like it's doing. Why don't we just do this directly to the thing? Well, the difference is, we could do this, and then on the blend shaped Buffer BS here, we could just turn it off. What we're going to do is apply those types of deformations to Buffer head, and they're going to all filter down. Instead of having to turn on 20 different things, we can have one controller through the Buffer heads so we can turn them all on or off if we want to. It's just a nice kind of way to organize blend shapes. I'm going to duplicate this head out again, and I'm going to move this over a little bit so we can tell it's not the Buffer blend shape. I'm going to actually duplicate this out a few times, and I'm basically going to model on these different types of poses that I want. In the most obvious case I think would be to create a blink. I'm going to go to edge mode, and I'm going to double-click on an edge here. I'm going to hit B to turn off soft select, and I'm going to select the middle and the inner one, so I'm going to do that on both sides. I'm going to hit B to turn on soft select and just scroll that out a little bit. I'm just going to try to make a blink real quick. I can just scale that down, and I actually turn on down here holding down R, left clicking, I can say prevent negative scale. I can just bring that down and not have to worry about it going through itself. It will stretch the textures, that's something you need to be aware of. The textures are obviously going to stretch, but that's the price you have to pay for this deformation. Now what we can do, we can have the blink. Let's have, maybe let's even have it be a wider eye. Let's make that same selection and expand, so we can scale this up. I might even just go straight up and down, and maybe increase the soft selection area here. Go straight up and down, and I'm going to maybe deselect some of this so we can scale in towards the bridge of the nose a little bit. Now we have wide-eyed, we have a blank. We can make new brow shape. We could do a lot of different things. Let me just choose these two and I'll drag them up. We'll be limited by texture a little bit here to change the brow shapes. They'll be a little more challenging because we're fighting against the shape of the texture that we drew, but it's still definitely possible to affect this stuff. Just taking a look in all directions here to make sure it's staying true to form a little bit. Basically what we can do is when we have a point that we like, I'm going to duplicate one more and have an angry face. Now we have four different models that we can select all of them at once and now apply as a blend shape to the buffer head. Let's go back to deform, Blend Shape, and we'll call this expressions. Before we do that actually, let's call this blink, wide eye, highbrow, and angry. I'm going to do one more just for fun, and I want to call that extra. I want to select all of these and shift select the head and call these expressions and hit "Apply". Now what's happened is on the buffer blend shape, we have this input called expressions, and we have each model represented in an animatable layer here. Now we can get the head to actually animate, and we could use multiple ones of these together. It's pretty cool and we're going to learn a little bit more about how to animate these in the animation part. It's fun to just play around with this stuff and you could separate this out. You can have, do one blink for the left eye, blink for the right eye and separate. You could go really deep on this stuff. You can have a ton of blend shapes. This is how in big feature films, how they create different facial expressions. They can have, a 100 of these things or more even to capture what a human face would do. Play around with that, and then I think at this stage of the game, if you've made it this far in the course, I think you can go back and create your own attribute, go to Add Attribute, and then create a Set Driven Key of the expressions, set driven key, and I'm going to leave that up to you as homework to make a set driven key on, add new attributes to the head control. That is going to be the homework for this, I feel like you've made it this far, you should be able to do that. If you can't, then you need to go back and re-watch the set driven key lesson, and then you'll be able to do that. Just to bake this in your mind, I want you to have to do that yourself, otherwise, I don't think you'll learn as much. We can hide all of this stuff, and we can always come back to it and change these models as well. But they're all in this head group, so we can just group them together and call these BS for blends shape, and just hit "Hide". Go through and make those Set Driven Keys. In the next lesson, we're just going to clean up this rig so it's going to be ready for animation. Then we'll be done with this part of the longer course here. Thanks for watching. 34. Bones Cleanup: In this lesson, I just want to talk through a little bit about what the final stages of rigging are. Before we begin, I wanted to include this update about how to include the head and the scale, because since we've created the entire rig, there's one little piece missing to make the whole thing scalable. At the beginning, early on we included all the cons in a group and then we scale constraint that, but we miss the geometry that had because that came afterwards in a later lesson. Let's include that now. We can click the Geo of the head and hit F and outline or to find it, and we can see that it's under this head group here. The head group is only parent constraints. It's parent constraint to this con, so it's not going to follow the scale of anything. We need to include a scale constraint on this head group. Let's select the bones route, because we wanted to scale relative to that, and let's select the head group by holding down Control and left clicking, and then go to Constrain under the animation menu here, and we can go down to scale. Now we can see that we've added a scale constraint to this group and when we scale the bones route, the head will follow. Let's get into the rest of the lesson. In this course, super congratulations that you've made it this far. If you're listening to this video, you're in the top one percent and I wouldn't think most people even get this far. It's a technical topic, but it's invaluable. It has to be done in animation, like you can't animate things without rigging. This is incredibly important and even if you don't want to go into rigging specifically, it's important to know as an animator or as really any other specific tract in the industry, whether it's games, film, commercials, or whatever it is, having any background in rigging is very, very valuable. Even though I'm strictly an animator, usually at my studio jobs, I find myself having to rig my own things. Let's say that the rigor mess something up or you have a scene where you need the prop to be built a certain way and the rigor is way underwater. They have too much work and they can't get to it, it'll take a week or two for them to get to your request. If you have any knowledge of rigging, you can just do it yourself and keep going and keep moving and work fast and be very valuable to a studio job if you have just a little bit of generalists knowledge like this. This last lesson, I just want to go through and tidy everything up so that this is ready for animation and you understand what an animator will want. What an animator will want is to not see any joints. There's a couple different ways we can do that. Because we used parenting, we can't just straight up hide them because it would hide the geometry that the joints were parented to. For example, if we just hide this joint, it's going to hide all of the geometry there. We don't want that to happen. Real quick, I just want to add this part in. You could actually hide the bones, it's possible, but it's a little tedious. You can select a bone, go into the attribute editor and then go down to draw style, and you can choose none. It'll hide that joint, but you'll have to do it for every joint in here and go to draw style, none. Another way would be to actually go through the spreadsheet that we've already learned about when we were adjusting the skin weights on the spine. If we go to Select and we go all by type and then choose the joints. Let's go up to the Windows, general editors and go down to the attribute spreadsheet that we've gone to before. Now if we go over to All, we should be able to get to the draw style over here, under joint. Let's scroll through this and see if we can find that option so we can affect all of them at the same time. Over here we have the draw style, and we can select all of this and go to the bottom and shift click the bottom, and type in none and hit "Enter". That way we have hidden all of the joints through the attribute spreadsheet. One other thing I wanted to do was to show you the fact that when we're animating this thing later, we may not want to give the animator access to all of these controls, namely the visibility and the scale controls. You can actually hide controls from here, we could select the scale controls, go to Channels and scroll down to hide selected. We can get rid of those because those aren't going to be useful for the animator, they're not going to scale this control at all. It's actually just getting in the way and making this area more complicated than it needs to be. We can also get that stuff back by going to Edit and going down to the Channel control and we can select which ones we want keyable and nonkeyable hidden. There's a long list of other attributes that we don't actually see there, and the ones that we hid were the scale. We could select those by shift clicking them and moving them over into the keyable, and now they're back. That's the way to control what's actually seen over here and to tidy up your rig in the case that you don't really want to show the scale for most of these controls. The other thing that we can do is get rid of the locators, we have a bunch of locators there. There's one nice tool we can go to Select all by type. Let's just tear this off and let's choose the IK Handles, and let's hide all of those, Control H. Unfortunately the locators, you can't select them from here. We can just select them from the rig, we know where they are. There's one on the head and then these couple on the hands here and the one on the head, and I think that's all if I'm remembering correctly. That one's fine. Let's hide those with Control H and we can also get rid of the curve. I don't know if you remember, I never really addressed the fact that from the modeling section we left this curve available to edit. In here somewhere there's a spine curve, we can just delete that whole thing. We can tidy that up and for the most part, that's all you need to do. But one really nice thing to do is to put all this stuff on a display layer. Let's grab everything that's not a con. We can grab the, actually we can just do it from the joints. Let's select all by type the joints again and then we can even select the spine. We can see what's not selected and go through and select this stuff. Let's hit the head and we got everything, we just want to make sure that no controls are selected. Then we'll go to the display menu over here. Here on the bottom right, you can click this far a button and it'll take any selection that we currently have, and I'll add it to a new display layer. I'll click that, and what this does is we can say NoTouch, call it bones in case there's multiple rigs in the scene and you can see the name and we can turn everything on and off really quickly. But what's more useful is to turn this to R, which means a reference. What that means is, I can't select this stuff when it has the R on, which means a reference. The other thing the animator is probably going to do as soon as they open the scene is go to Show and turn off joints. That's how they'll control whether or not they see the joints, and for your peace of mind, you'll know that they aren't going to be animating the joints or the geometry themselves. If they want to, all they have to do is just hit this R button over here and now they have access to that, that's pretty cool. We can hit "R" again, and now we're back to that mode. I do just want to say a final congratulations on finishing this section of the course. It's a lot to cover, and this definitely isn't an exhaustive rigging course, this is definitely just meant to introduce beginners to it. I think it's done a pretty good job but there's always more to learn and that will never change, that's the one consistency. I don't care who you are, there's always going to be something to learn. Just keep that mindset and keep going forward, and I look forward to seeing you in the next part of this course. We'll continue learning 3D animation and Autodesk Maya. Thanks for watching.