3D Modeling Tutorial #60 - Introduction to Rigging and Animation

hello and welcome to 3d modeling video number 60 in this video I will give you an introduction to rigging an animation and how we can use it in our modeling so I'm not yet ready to teach you guys animation because there's still a lot we need to learn about modeling and everything else so the reason I'm teaching you this right now is because as you're modeling you will sometimes be creating an object that will eventually be animated and if you create your object and then figure out that the animation doesn't quite work well you will have to waste time and you might get frustrated because now you've you've got the wrong design so it can help you immensely to block out and create some basic animation as you're modeling to make sure your animation works correctly and there's no clipping issues clipping is when your geometry intersects in ways that it should not and it creates a bad effect so we're gonna go ahead and learn how to create something like this you can see that this object is still not finished it's still highly work-in-progress and you can see that because I blocked out the animation I can see what kind of problems there are and here is a clipping issue that I'm talking about in this case this box is intersecting with this grenade object it should not be doing this so because I blocked at the animation I can fix this problem I can nip this problem in the bud right away instead of having a and then we'll spend a lot of time modeling adding detail and then figuring out that it doesn't quite work the way I need it to so you can save yourself time and frustration and eliminate problems early so before we learn that let's go ahead and hide this object okay so let's go ahead and learn some of the principles of rigging and animation so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna create a basic leg here okay so here is a basic leg object in to differentiate the joints I can go ahead and give them a different material different color alright so here's a basic leg we've got the foot ankle shin knee thigh and hip so the basics of animation is we use this tool right here called the Select and Link tool we click on it it becomes highlighted and now we link from child to parent so the parent is the object that controls all the position rotation scaling of the child so anything that happens to the parent or having to the child so from child you click and drag and you hold and you see the line is emanating from the object from the child and you hover over the parent and let go child to parent child to parent child to parent and child to parent so what we've done now is we've created a hierarchy so this child will follow everything that happens to this parent rotation movement and scaling you can see I can move this individually of all the other objects so if I move this here then I move this you can see that this object is still following this object so it's still linked even though they're not physically connected so that's in the front thing to keep in mind so the knee this is the parent object of this one which is the parent object of this one and so on so you've created a nice linked hierarchy and now you're ready to begin some basic animation with this and this is a great tool because you can animate very quickly and you can get up to speed and you can't it really helps you in your modeling because now if I'm modeling this in a robotic leg I now know exactly how far the geometry needs to go and I know that there can be a problem if there's clipping for example if I do some some basic modeling here and a model this piece here I'll know that there's a problem if I go here because now if I rotate too much you can see there is a clipping issue here so I know exactly how far my geometry can go and that's the great thing about it so this is an example of how modeling doing some basic animation blackout can help you in your modeling you can know exactly how far your geometry needs to go before it starts creating issues so that is the basics of rigging that is as simple as it gets of course it gets a lot more complex once you start adding more details here you get adding Springs and pistons and hydraulic cylinders it gets a lot more complex but in this way you can keep things nice and manageable also there's organic rigging and you know if you if you're creating stuff like a transformer which has you know like hundreds and thousands of moving parts then it gets a little bit tricky but for our purposes right now this is a powerful tool that gives you a lot of options and it's very easy to use so now that's the basics of rigging let's learn about the basics of animation so right here we have the animation timeline and go ahead and move this out of the way we have zero all the way to a hundred so we actually have 101 frames they are ways to decrease and increase the amount of frames but that's not important right now actually let's go ahead and do that so what you want to do is you want to right click on this button right here which is called time configuration all you want to just left-click and write right here you can set the length of your animation so let's go ahead set the end time to 20 okay so now I notice that the timeline has changed now it goes all the way from 0 to 20 so that can make things easier so let's create a basic animation I'm going to click on auto key we have 2 main ways of setting our frames here auto key and set key and whenever you activate either one of them you don't have set a red border appears around your viewport letting you know you are an animation mode and it's a very important that lets you know that because you can end up messing some things up if you accidentally edit them while you're in an animation mode so it visibly lets you know your an animation mode you can see when I change from Auto key to set key the red hue the red color is slightly different but I'm gonna go ahead and use Auto key and basically what I would do is I'll go to frame 10 and then we'll go ahead and make sure angle Snap is on and I will go ahead and rotate by 90 degrees and you'll notice now that we have two green boxes that just appeared when I rotated one at this frame zero and one out of frame 10 so the green color represents rotation if I go to frame 15 and move it you can see that a red box has appeared I'm gonna frame 20 and scale it you can see a blue box has appeared so each color represents a different transform movement rotation and scaling now go ahead and press control Z to undo that so now that I've gone to frame 10 rotated 30 is max because I'm using Auto key 3ds max will automatically create a frame and 0 and 10 because in order for animation to occur you need to have at least two different frames if you go and delete frame 0 I'll just go ahead and click on this box and press Delete there's no animation now because there's not nothing nothing is animating from one frame to the next you need at least two frames for animation to occur so now we have two frames if I now move my slider here you can see the animation has occurred and you play this animation you can also click on this play animation button right here the standard arrow facing right and it will just loop back and forth from 0 to 20 and again so here is our basic animation now to move through the timeline you can just click on it there's also a left and right arrow here and if you click on it your mouse cursor will actually follow it I've done some tests and and when I'm recording it doesn't quite look that way it does not look like the mouse cursor is following it but if you actually do it you will see if the mouse cursor actually follows the arrow even though it does not look like 80 right now so that's how we can preview our animation and basically that's how we work with it okay now some problems that may occur if I go to frame 15 turn on AutoKey and let's say I want this cylinder to move from frame 10 to frame 15 I wanted to move up a little bit okay so the problem has been created now is that since at frame 10 there is only a green key here which means it's only copying the animate the rotation and frame 10 that means it's not gonna be moving from frame you can see that a red box has been created here at frame 0 which basically means that now it's gonna be moving from frame 0 to frame 15 you can see that all from frame 0 to 15 it moves up slightly and this is not what I want so I'm gonna go ahead and press control Z and this is what I will do instead I will go to frame 0 and I'll click on this key button set keys that will set the position rotation and scaling of this object right here I'll call you the same for this frame frame 10 now it has recorded the position of this object at frame 0 and frame 10 although a religous neared frame 10 and now when I go to frame 15 and move it up now the movement will only happen from 10 to 15 and you'll notice from frame zero to frame tell it's not moving it only begins moving from frame 10 to 15 because I have set the key at frame 10 if I did not set the key it will only have two frames 15 and 0 so it would move several create movement between 0 and 15 instead of 10 to 15 so always keep in mind you might have to just click on this key to set the position rotation and scaling and any other parameters remember that you can animate a lot of things in 3ds max not just the position rotation movement you can use you can animate materials you can animate modifiers and so much more so there is really a lot of whole world of animation for us to explore later on so anyways here is that and once again if I go to frame 20 and let's say I want to scale it the scaling is now happening between frames 10 and 20 because that's the last time I set the scaling was at 10 so now it's gonna scale from 10 to 20 and if I want to tap in between 15 and 20 I'll go to 15 click on the key you can see that blue has appeared which means it has recorded the blue the scaling value here and then I can scale it here and now it's scale was only between 15 and 20 okay and that's the quick the quick and dirty of animating if you want to unlink your selection if you don't want them to be connected anymore you can select one or more objects and then click on the button next to select the link which is called unlink selection and now you can see that the cylinder is still rotating moving and scaling but nothing is following it so you can just quickly the great thing about this is you can just quickly relink it again and you'll be back to the animation okay someone go ahead and delete this let's get back to our other object okay I'm gonna select this I'm gonna go ahead and clone this as a copy I'll go ahead and unlink this as well okay so here is a grenade type type object I'm working on it's gonna have a secondary function the primary function is that you throw it the secondary function is that it deploys its legs here and you can use it you can set as a proximity mine which means it's going to blow up and somebody gets close and in order for you to be able to easily put it on any surface it needs to have these little legs that come out and prop it up give it a good foothold so that's what I'm gonna do today so I want these legs to kind of open up and flip out here so what I'll do is first I'll create a cylinder cylinders are of course one of the best ways to create your animations because they rotate very nicely and I can go ahead and reset the xform and a sensor the pivot to the object all right so let's go ahead and make these transparent and let's go ahead and get our cylinder into position a little bit too big let me go ahead and scale it down all right so basically I can just position it in a variety of different positions down here up here so let's go with here for now and I'm gonna go ahead and hold shift and clone another one up here for the right here and this is still the blackout phase this is still the very experimental phase where I can pretty much go in a lot of different ways I can experiment with the positioning of these cylinders at this point and lastly I'll just go ahead and and put a box in there as well so I'm gonna position the bottom of the box I'm going to go ahead and intersect it with this cylinder I've used old a to align it to the cylinder and now I can rotate it increase the height so there we go so now we have this all right so let's go ahead and okay so I'm gonna go ahead and set up the linking right now I'll go ahead isolate these and so remember child to parent so this is the child of this parrot this is the child of this parent and this is the child of this parent and now we've set up some basic animations let's go ahead and I mean we set up some basic rigging now let's do some animation turn on AutoKey I'm gonna go to frame 10 rotated like this and I will also rotate this cylinder okay and now let's go ahead and go back okay so let's go ahead and preview the animation and if you want this effect to happen over a longer period of time you can simply just I'm gonna go and select this cylinder and this one as well and I'll go ahead and select this ten the frame at ten and move it all the way to frame 20 so now I have increased the duration of the animation if I think that it was happening too fast now it's happening much more slowly okay so now I want to also preview the animation I wanted to happen all all around the model on all these four areas so what I'm gonna do is there was a technique I taught you in one of my earlier videos about how we can use the reference coordinate system to do that so you might have forgotten that or maybe you have not seen the video so I will teach you one more time what you basically do is you go under here and you select pick and then you click on the object you want to use so I'll click on this one right here and you'll now see that the name has changed to reflect this object right here so now I will switch to the bottom option which is use transform coordinate system I mean use transform coordinates Center so now what I can do is I could select these objects use the bottom one hold shift I'll make an instance and now the animation will occur all around the model so now that I've blocked out the animation it now gives me a much easier time modeling because I can know exactly how far the geometry can go before begins to clip so if I start creating details and I start babbling for example babbling and extruding I don't know that this is too far and you can go up to here so it allows me to model with confidence because I know exactly how far I can take it before it starts clipping and other issues start being created now I can start modeling and creating a lot of various details here and while you're modeling all the linking animation is still working so you can actually model while you can wow in different phases of your animation so this gives even more control over exactly what kind of geometry you have and it gives you a good preview of your animation you can even use symmetry here even turbosmooth so this way you will not you will not have to save your animation to the last second you can animate a while you model which creates a very intuitive and helpful workflow and you can save yourself time and frustration and you can preview if you're working on you know for a person you know in the company for a boss you can preview you can show your boss your supervisor the animation and you know they can approve it and that way you don't you won't have to go back and redo everything because the boss doesn't like what you've done you can just show him and he can make some comments about the animation so now I'm just adding more detail and you basically just go from here and they now have a very fast intuitive workflow for creating animations as you model so thank you for watching and take care

Channel: Arrimus 3D

Views: 8,242

Keywords: education, tutorial, Autodesk 3ds Max (Award-Winning Work), autodesk, 3d, 3ds, 3D Modeling (Film Job), 3D Computer Graphics, Animated, animation, rigging, model, modeling, learn, class, arrimus, cg, cgi, lesson, geometry, object, mesh, link, linking, hierarchy, rig, parent, child, cylinder, machine, mechanical, block, out

Id: NTc2_qtQ9wQ

Length: 23min 36sec (1416 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 27 2014