- [Mayet] Hello, this is Mayet Andreassen, and today we are going to go over how to create custom
attributes for a control and add our blend shapes to those custom attributes
and that control. So right here you can see
that I have my blend shapes. I have some very simple blend shapes. Now, this is how you create
blend shapes in Maya 2018 which is very different from
the previous versions of Maya. To find out how I created
these blend shapes please look at the tutorial in eCampus that goes over how to create
blend shapes in Maya 2018. So you can see here that we have a Stretch and we have Squash, and that we have our default ball. So we have our blend shapes,
I'm going to minimize this. And we have a control So I can grab my control and my rig and I can move it around, I can zero it out back to its
origin, I can also rotate it. So I have all of these abilities. The first thing I am going to do is I'm going to clean up the channel box by locking and hiding
my scale and visibility. I'm going to hide the
visibility of my locator, and now we can basically get started. So the first thing I want to do is I want to create some custom
attributes for my control. As you can see here we have a
Squash and we have a Stretch. So those are the attributes
we want to create. So I'm going to go to my Channels menu and go Edit, Add Attribute, and I'm going to add a Squash attribute, and make sure it is keyable and float. Now, the default we want it at zero. You can set a minimum and a maximum. And this will allow it
so that the blend shape doesn't get too out of control. (laughs) So we could do a minimum
of, it could be zero, and the maximum we can
set it to 10, all right. And then we're going to click add because we want to make one more. And we're going to make this Stretch, it's going to be keyable, it's going to be float,
the default is zero, maximum is 10 and minimum is zero. And we're going to click OK. Now, you can also edit your attribute, so you can go Edit
attribute for the squash. So I can take a look
at my squash attribute. And it says it has a
maximum, and the minimum. So you can go in here and you can actually change
these values if you wanted to. You can make it displayable,
you can make it hidden, so you can go in and you
can edit your attribute if you make a mistake. Okay, well now we have the attributes and they are on the control. But we can't actually do
anything with the attributes yet, because we haven't linked
them up to our blend shapes. So the first thing I'm going to do is open my Connection Editor. So I'm going to go to Windows, General Editors, Connection Editor. And when you open your Connection Editor it should look like this. If it doesn't it might be because you have Show
Non-Keyable checked on. So if you open your Connection Editor and it looks a little bit like this which can be very confusing
and a little overwhelming, go to your Left Display
'cause this is the left side, and uncheck Non-Keyable. And what you will see are
only the keyable channels, okay, only the keyable connections, and as you can see we have Translate, Rotate, Squash, and Stretch. All right, so on the right side we need to add our blend shapes. And how do we do that? Well, I'm going to click on my ball here, and I'm going to scroll down to INPUTS, and you'll see that there is a Ball1 here. Now if I open up my Shape Editor you will also see I have
a Ball1 here as well, and that's actually what
my blend shape is called, it's called Ball1. So I'm going to click on Ball1, and you will see that there is
both Squash and Stretch here and with Ball1 selected I'm
going to reload the Right. And so right here now we can see that I have my Ball1 and if you click on Weight you will see the Squash and the Stretch. So this is pretty easy. You click Squash over
here on your Left Display, and then click Squash
on your Right Display. And then you're going to click
Stretch on your Left Display and Stretch on your Right Display, and hit close and it should work. So now when I collect, I
select, (laughs) excuse me, this control I should be
able to squash and stretch. So I should be able to go 10,
uh oh, let's try negative 10. Oh we can't do that. So it looks like my
stretch is working great. So my stretch is going up to 10, and if I click in here and
middle-mouse click here and middle-mouse drag, should be able to Control
+ Middle-Mouse Drag, it won't let me, you're not
going to let me, let's try this. No, well, let's click out of here, let's
click over here. (laughs) So I'm trying to Control
+ Middle-Mouse Drag, it won't let me, so
let's do five, one, okay. So one is actually what it was at default. So now that I've played
around with this a bit, I know that really I want this at one and it looks like I probably
want my stretch at one as well. So I'm going to go and I'm
actually going to change some of these attributes 'cause right now they're just
a little bit too extreme. So I'll put this back at zero, and I'm going to go to Edit in
my Channels, Edit Attribute, and I'm going to select Squash
and make my maximum one. And I'm going to select my
Stretch and make my maximum one. And then I'm going to close it, and now I should be able to do anything, let's see if we can do this, yeah, here we go, now it's working, so I'm Control + Left-Mouse Dragging, and I've got this nice squash and then if I click on this and Control + Left-Mouse
Drag I've got a nice stretch. And that is how you create
custom attributes on a control, and add your blend shapes to that control. Until next time, bye-bye.
