3D Tips- Maya Character Rigging

what's up everyone and welcome back to another 3d tips today we'll be talking about character rigging in maya so if you ever wondered how to rig your characters quickly and efficiently in maya this is the tutorial you need so if we look at the character that we have in maya it's already rigged here and you know everything about this character can be moved so we can move the hands we can select multiple controllers here you know and move them into a specific position this end as well too you know if you decide to move the legs you can move the legs and so on so this is what rigging is it's giving you the ability to move your character in any given position and that's very useful for creating characters that move and have a lot of appeal so how is this done well this is done with the help of a plugin that's called advanced skeleton so advanced skeleton is a plug-in that is downloadable from for free on their website and you can install it in maya and once it's installed you can follow along this tutorial and hopefully you will learn a thing or two so try to keep up please all right so we're back in maya here and what i'm going to do is i'm going to quickly show you how this looks once you've installed your uh plug-in advanced skeleton it should appear here at the top in your shelf for me it's in the rigging shelf but for you it might appear somewhere else anyhow it works exactly the same once you click on the number five here you would have the doc with advanced skeleton options appearing on the left side here okay so what i want to do is go around here and select everything that i have now and delete so that i have a clean file where i just have the model okay so the first step you want to do is to select your geometry and go to preparation model and hit model clean what this is going to do it's going to create a top shape for you like a top group level shape called geo and it's going to group all of your geometry under that group once you've done that you can click clean and it's going to clean your scene if there are any specific nodes that are in there that need cleaning it's going to clean them out for you finally once you're ready you can select this button here that says new scene and in there what you're gonna do is you're gonna create a new scene it's created automatically for you and then you're gonna click on reference and you're gonna go and find in your finder or in your browser your 3d model again and you're going to import it again so you're going to say reference and your model is going to come into the scene like this now what happens is that you get this model on a layer here and it's templated templated meaning that you cannot you know select click or anything on that model specifically you cannot choose any vertices and so on because it's locked so that you can create your joints and your skeleton without messing around with the geometry now that that is done you can certainly come back to the layer here and click twice on the t button for it to become selectable again but i advise to make sure that you keep it on templated because that way you're not going to inadvertently select something that you're not supposed to now that this is done what the next option is is clicking on body and importing the biped so once you click import on the biped it's going to create a biped here only the left side because we're going to mirror the right side once we adjust the left side so you get one control here the fit skeleton control and you can scale it up if you hit s on your keyboard and you can scale it up so that it roughly fits the body of your model now i'm looking specifically when i'm scaling to scale it on the root here so that the root fits exactly where it's supposed to be a little bit above the hips okay and the hips are just below where the hips should be just slightly but anyhow once you've set this up this is the route i'm aiming for and after that i'm gonna manually adjust anything that requires adjusting now that this is done i just wanna look at one thing here and show you that you cannot come in and start changing the bones here or the joints as we call them in maya because each of the joints has what we call a local rotation axis and in order for these joints to rotate as they're supposed to they need to be aiming at each other in a specific way here okay uh the x y and z the x here should be aiming at towards the other joint but going into details regarding that is not important at this stage what is important though is to make sure that you select the option fit mode here under the editing tab you have a fit mode and when you click fit mode what happens is that actually you see in your viewport that you've entered the fit mode and what you what you can do now is move around your joints so that you get uh them into the required position and once you've done that the all the local rotation axes will move as they're supposed to so you don't have to worry about that it's done automatically for you now i'm going to select uh this spine joint here and i'm going to move it slightly so that it i bring it into position where it's supposed to be don't want to move things too much because it's already well established for me here so i'm just going to move the shoulder a little bit down i'm going to bring back the i'm gonna bring back the elbow here and move the hand into position okay and you constantly want to orbit around to make sure that your rig is set exactly where it's supposed to be so now i'm moving the joints where they're supposed to be on the hand yeah and this is important to get it right because when the skinning comes the part where actually your geometry is being attached to these joints here well you don't want the joints to be in the wrong position because then you will have deformations that are not working and you will have a lot of work to adjust all of this this skinning afterwards so it's better to check and orbit around your scene to make sure that all of your joints are in the correct position okay and you want to spend a bit more time making sure that this is done properly i'm kind of going quickly here to show you guys how this works okay so now that i've set up the hand i'm just going to quickly select the head move the head into position this is the eye joint i'm going to move the eye joint in position here and the head joint a little bit higher the jaw joint as well here i'm not too worried about this because i'm gonna do another tutorial where i'm talking about uh the face rig so all of these joints are gonna be changed either way but anyhow let's just get them roughly into position here is the knee the knee is important i'm gonna bring into position and slightly rotate and then bring it to a bit lower then i'm gonna bring the foot a little bit higher and back i have two more joints here the big toe and the oops no i just want to select the big toe and delete that and the pinky toe those are extra joints that we don't need now because we would need them if the character was wasn't wearing any shoes but now since the character has shoes we don't really need those two extra joints okay so let's bring the the foot a little bit more into position like so and once this is done and you you've put the your joints into the correct position you're ready to move on on to the next stage which is actually building the advanced skeleton and mirroring everything you have from the left side onto the right side but one important thing to remember here is that you want to save your file because if you did something wrong or you moved your joints and you didn't for example exit the auto orienting option which is the fit mode which i'm in now you need to exit this and save your file because if you want to change something later on and you didn't you will have to rebuild the entire skeleton so in order not to do that don't want to do things twice or three times or 50 times and trust me i redid my fair share of rigging so please select the whatever you have now save your file and then build the skeleton otherwise you're entering in a world of trouble and who wants that nobody wants that so now let's have a look at actually exiting the fit mode which is here um i'm gonna update either way all the orientation of the joints manually and then exit fit mode and once i have that i'm gonna save my file okay under file save scene as and just save your file done or increment and save if you prefer and then i'm ready to click on build advanced skeleton and once that is done what is actually doing it's it's building the right side and creating control curves for all the joints that we have in our scene now you can see it if i select one of the joints and i start moving it it's moving the if i'm selecting sorry one of the control curves and i'm moving it it's actually moving the corresponding joints okay but for now it's not moving the body because we need to apply something that's called the bind skin onto the rig so it's actually bringing the polygons and attach them with the uh with the joints for them to drive the corresponding geometry now to do that you have a couple of options in in advanced skeleton option one two three i'm generally using option two which is creating a skin cage around the joints which can be useful later on to to have you know a low poly version of your character to use in a very polygon heavy scene and maybe you want to quickly animate uh your character and not have to watch the entire geometry or have the entire geometry of your character in the scene that's especially important when you have some characters that are very complex and and geometry heavy but anyhow what i want to do now is click on create skin cage and what's what it's going to do it's going through the entire rig and it's creating the skin cage and binding it to the corresponding joints now once it's done what i actually can do is take from each of these polygons their weights the skin weights that were applied and applied them on my geometry so to do that i'm just going to hide the uh skin curves and i'm going to select now the i'm hiding the the skin cage and i'm going to select now the corresponding geometry by actually untemplating my geometry i'm just gonna make sure that under show none and show polygons i'm selecting only the required geometry so i'm selecting the geometry here and i am saying copy weights this is the contextual menu that i need to click on under deform copy weights and what's happening now is that it's applying all the weights that i have from the skin cage onto my polygonal mesh okay and if i go back to show and say nurbs curves if i bring back the nurbs curves watch what happens now if i start rotating my character well you can see that it's moving according to what i need okay so this is the basics of how to quickly rig your character with advanced skeleton so the next thing that is important here is that no binding or skinning or rigging of your character is going to be perfect the first time around even advanced skeleton is not going to be perfect so what needs to happen now that you need to go in and adjust specific areas that are very very important to to be adjusted because otherwise your character is not going to look realistic even though if it's a cartoony character you need to make sure that the volumes and the deformations are constant and that they make sense so let's have a quick look at how to do that okay now okay so let's check the areas that are problematic like let's see the areas that are problematic mostly are the shoulder areas the knee area and those require what we call corrective blend shapes so let me show you why if you select this controller and you bring it up let's hide for now the shirt you can see that the volume of the shoulder and the deformation of the hand is not really realistic so you need to correct and compensate for that every time that you rotate your controller in a specific angle or rotation now we need to make corrective blend shapes so this is located under pose and then corrective shapes and you're going to bring your specific shape in the required position with the controller and then you're going to select your shape and say creative corrective shape it's gonna say okay when the angle reaches this position or rotation then i'm gonna apply this blend shape okay that's fine so it enters into a mode that's called skull geometry tool and if you hold shift you can you know soften the the area or if you don't hold shift it will pull the area but i really don't like to work with this tool or every time what i prefer is to get out of the tool and then select the edges that i want to use for example this one this one and this one and then i like to um i like to move a certain area by holding b and middle mouse dragging that's going to select an area okay and that area is what i'm interested in you can also select the vertices vertus vertex or vertices and then you know bring them into the required position and you can always go under modeling and go under surface and say skull geometry tool and here you have multiple options that you can use uh like for example softening and then you can soften by holding shift or if you select the tool directly like this and then you retain your corrective shape what happens is you select this and then you don't click on mirror because if you use the mirroring option what happens is that sometimes it breaks your rig so you don't want to use the mirroring just apply on this side and then you're going to manually do the other side okay and then you can see what happens is that when you bring the shoulder up the corrective shape kicks in and it uses a blend shape to actually compensate and keep the required volume okay under display show all i'm going to bring back the shirt and now watch what happens is that i need to select this as well the shirt and create a corrective shape as well for the shirt so i'm going to click on create corrective shape say yes and then i'm going to you know actually bring it back to the build pose and then i'm gonna rotate this like this select the shape that i want to um to apply to okay so rotate like this select the shape say create corrective shape click ok and then i'm gonna hit b on my keyboard left mouse button to scale a little bit the brush i'm holding shift to soften this area a little bit i'm gonna ctrl h on my keyboard to hide the hand because i can't really see what's going on but you can clearly see the concept being illustrated here you want to retain the shape and look at what this default skinning is doing it doesn't have the shape that is required anymore so you want to select all the vertices here hit b on your keyboard select a bit of a wider area then bring everything back up here maybe rotate it slightly so this is where it should be then you can go under surface skull geometry tool and then you can soften again a little bit this area okay and we can go under display show last hidden bring back the arm and this is roughly the position where i want it to be i can select a bit more like this to illustrate the concept and this is what you want let's say that this would be the corrective shape select the geometry click apply and then when you start rotating this is what happens it adjusts for for the shape here and this is what you want to have okay right so this is for the corrective shapes and this should be done on the right side another another thing as well is that you can rotate down and you can see that the shoulder again here isn't keeping the volume it's required to keep so we're gonna hit create corrective shape again and we're going to select all the vertexes here okay and bring them back into the required position to keep the volume okay remember we want to keep the volume that's why we're doing this yeah and i'm doing this quickly to illustrate the concept okay so this would roughly be it maybe a little bit higher like this okay still comes down a little bit okay and then we hit apply and watch what happens now when we're rotating this it keeps the shape when it goes up it changes the shape so we always retain the shoulder area and we retain the volume all right now the next area that you want to work with is the knees same thing here see when the knees are bending what's happening is that it looks more like a rubber hose than a knee so we select the create corrective shape and then we bring back this area okay or you can select the corresponding vertex or faces however you prefer to work select those click b on your keyboard make the selection area a bit bigger and just make sure that you keep this area of the knee like this and then maybe we can select this area to make sure that you know you retain a bit of a shape here or or the knee okay once you're done click apply and there you go it retains the shape that we want and then as the last thing that you want to check i mean is you want to go through your rig and make sure that whatever moves moves correctly okay the fingers everything's fine okay and then the foot if you bring up the foot then generally what you're gonna face is you know you will have to to adjust the skin weights and and to do this uh you will want to go into the skin weight tool and you go under rigging skin and then you will have the paint skin weight tool then when this paint skin weights tool comes up what this what this does is that it collects all the influences that the joints have on this specific poly polygon object all right and now to start with this what you can do is you can actually see [Music] so here is the the tool the paint skin weight tool and what happens with this tool is that again you have all of the joints that are listed here and what i what i want to do is i want to go through this by selecting smooth and then you know hit twice the flood button to you know smooth a little bit the areas that have been done automatically you know so that this way when you go back into object mode when you're moving you know it has a little bit of a better movement that is expected so if you hit y on your keyboard you get back into the tool and again you have to spend some time here by looking at you know the uh where the influences are and for example you can replace the influence and make sure that the value is one and if you paint this for example problematic polygon you can see it's gone and then when we animate this and move it around you see that the dress is now behaving in a much more realistic way so this is in a nutshell how to rig your character quickly in advance skeleton remember one thing that is very important spend some time to check all of your rig before you finish it because you want to make sure that all the deformations are working as expected before you start animating so look at this you have an option in advanced skeleton that allows you to actually do this and it's called the poser designer or the animation tester okay one of these two or the walk designer one of these three help you to to do this let's check the animation tester so if you click on it what's going to happen it's going to rotate the joints on a specific angle let's keep it as default every five frames and if you hit apply it's going to take your model through all the different possible combinations so that when you scrub your timeline it actually shows you what's going on and you can check your skin weights and paint whatever needs to be painted or adjusted manually so let it run through and then i'm gonna show you how this looks like okay when you scrub your timeline you can look at how your body is deforming and if it's deforming as expected then you know that everything is okay right and you can go through your character like that once you've once you're done with painting all the skin weights you can remove the body animation as well you can have for example the walk designer and it pops up a window where you start the walk designer and it's going to create a walk cycle for you and with that you can check how uh the model is moving okay so you scrub in the timeline and it actually shows you the locations that might be problematic like for example you can see that there is a an area that pops out here that would need to be fixed by painting the skin weights so you need to spend a bit bit a bit of time unfortunately to arrange all the skin weights manually but trust me it's worth it because once you do this right well then your character it's gonna is gonna work as expected okay so this is roughly uh an introduction to rigging in advanced skeleton and remember if there is one thing that you need to do and you know what that is is to like this video and don't forget to hit the bell icon to get notified when the new video about facial rigging in maya gets posted and you would be the first one to know just hit the bell icon and you will know trust me you will know when the video is out in the meantime i salute you

Channel: KINOMENTOR

Views: 1,043

Keywords: maya, 3dtips, rigging, advanced skeleton, kinomentor, 3d, animation, 3danimation

Id: 9ho6K_1HUV8

Length: 29min 23sec (1763 seconds)

Published: Sat May 08 2021