Hey everyone, in this tutorial we’re going to take a look at how you can use Character Creator 4’s auto-rig tool to bind the skeleton for a character model with multiple meshes. If you’re not yet familiar with AccuRig, please check out the Getting Started tutorial first. OK first things first, we need to import our character. In this case, I’m simply going to drag an OBJ to the viewport, which will then automatically be defined as a prop. In the Attributes tab of the Modify panel, you’ll want to ensure that your character is centered by zeroing out the Transform values. Once that’s done, we can enter into AccuRIG. If we go over to the Scene Manager, you can see that there are a number of separate clothing and accessory meshes included with this character. We can hide all of the unwanted meshes for now and just keep the character’s body mesh. With the main body mesh selected, go over to the Skeleton and Bind section in the Modify panel and choose Selected Meshes and then Create Guides. This will auto detect and generate joint markers for the body mesh. You can click on each joint marker to bring up a reference image which shows its ideal placement. Let’s enter into orthogonal mode in order to restrict the viewport angle for more accurate marker position refinement. You’ll want to make sure that the markers are placed correctly from all angles. When positioning leg markers from a side view, they will often be placed between the legs as they are layered on top of each other from that perspective. A quick way to bypass that is to switch to Front Part mode. This will ensure it is placed at the midpoint of the closest limb to camera view. There is also a Symmetry option which allows you to move left and right joint markers simultaneously. In this case, the character’s left arm has an accessory on it which may mess with the auto placement. We can just enable Whole Mesh mode in this case and then it will be placed properly in the middle of the forearm. This character has some unusual proportions, so just ensure that you follow the reference image to find the correct placement for the other markers. The head of this character is also quite unconventional, in which case we can’t really rely entirely on the reference image. Therefore, we’ll divide it into 2 parts. The blue area will represent the character’s head, while the green will represent the neck. Since the head is basically in front of the neck, the proper marker placement will have them nearly side by side. Let’s move on to the hands. This model is lacking a couple of fingers, so we need to use the drop-down menu in the Modify panel to choose 3 fingers, and then proceed to Generate Skeleton. You can use the bone Gizmo Display Settings to adjust how the bones appear in your viewport. You can also click on Bone List or use the F3 hotkey which will open up the Bone Manager panel. You can tweak the bone positions from here as well. You’ll see that there were also basic facial bones generated. It’s important to note here that facial bones are not assigned any skin weight values, but we should still ensure that they’re placed in the correct position so these values can be assigned more accurately later. Once the body and facial bones are all set, then we can continue on to the left hand. Again, every case will be slightly different depending on your character’s unique structure, so just follow the reference image as best you can to get the joint markers placed accurately. You can always refine the positions in the Bone Manager later as well. If you have Symmetry Selection enabled, the markers will be placed the same on the right hand. Once the hand marker placement is done, then it’s time to move on to the skin weights. In this case, I want to ensure that I select all of the meshes that make up the character’s body including the eyes and teeth, as well as any clothing meshes that are meant to be skin-tight or conform exactly to the body mesh’s movement. Once that’s done, simply click the Bind Skin button, which will automatically generate your skin weights. This may take a bit of time depending on the complexity of your character’s mesh and its poly count. Note that after you do this, the items not selected in the skin weight generation will now be defined as accessories in the Scene Manager, although they’re currently not visible. You can also see that the skeleton colors will be changed, which indicates successful skin weight assignment. Now it’s time to check the animated results. First, click on Check Animation, and in the Animation Player, you can find a number of test and calibration motions. You can see the accurate results here after we apply a simple walking animation. If you’re satisfied with the results, then just exit Check Animation mode and click on AccuRIG once again to exit AccuRIG mode. You’ll see that your character is now defined as Humanoid, and in the Scene Manager we can toggle the visibility of the character’s accessories. Note that all of the accessories have also automatically been attached to the relevant character bones as well, so that when the character is animated the accessories will move right along with it. However, when we apply an animation you can see that we need to adjust the position of the axe. Click on the Remove button and select Bind Pose first, then we can proceed to select the axe and go over to Edit Pivot in the Modify panel. Here, we want to use the rotate and transform gizmos to ensure that the selection box is positioned correctly around the actual axe mesh, and that the pivot point itself is on the handle where we want the hand to grab it. We can then exit Pivot mode and move the axe itself into the correct position and rotation in the hand. Once that’s done, we can test out the results with an animation and see that the axe is now correctly placed in the hand. The finger position can always be edited later in iClone. That’s it for this tutorial guys. With the new auto-rigging tool you can easily generate and bind the skeleton of your character, and then use other tools to create a facial expression system. Finally, you can proceed to export it into iClone or any other CG or gaming software for use in your projects. Be sure to check back on our YouTube channel for all the latest tutorials, and I’ll see you in the next video.
