Advanced Skeleton Setup - Body Rig - Part 1 of 2

this is a video tutorial on how to use Animation Studios advanced skeleton Auto rigging system our advanced modular rigging system I give a workshop on this at DePaul University on Friday what day was it Friday the 13th I guess I should remember that this is just a quicker version of that same thing to keep things moving a little faster since at the workshop it was a little bit of back and forth so I want to make this a little bit more efficient for those of you who want to learn how to use the system it's a fantastic system published by the animation studios our animation city is you can go to the website here animation studios calm day you here's the the plug-in essentially the plug-in for my it's a Mel script you can download it here for free if you're a student or independent user basically anyone not making money off of it and if you need to make money off of it you can purchase it for really cheap so it's it's really it's extremely reasonable there's also a website here if you go to Facebook there's tons of videos on how to actually use the rigging system you can scroll through here part of the reason why I'm making this video is because while there's lots of videos on the Facebook page they're really fast and took me a little bit of playing around to get to get it to everything to work just right so wanna kind of help all of you avoid some issues I did but also promote it because it's been such a great tool for me and I know for students this is a this can be a lifesaver can really get you working in your production quickly and not get you bogged down with rigging one of the best things about this whole system that I really really like is that aside from it being free for students which is such a huge help is it's actually one of the best auto burgers I've ever used regardless of cost it has a facial rigging system which most of them do not they're just body rigs it's incredibly flexible as you'll note from what it says right here you can create rigs with unlimited body configurations three heads five legs a hundred fingers anything goes this is totally true again it takes a little bit of getting used to if you're doing anything be above beyond the norm it's extremely flexible I find that the Creator whose name I cannot find which is too bad because I would love to give him props clearly is making this for the user the independent user who wants to be creative and do their own thing and not just pump out the same old everyday by pedal if you undo that you're fine with that it's fine with that too so it's just an incredibly flexible system the other thing that I really like about it is allows you to create allows you to create a rig test it and if you don't like it to make changes really fast which you can't do on your own if you just read it yourself and I've never seen any of the system allow you to do in this manner which is really fantastic so and I'll surely be showing you that that part of the system as well it's also very fast easy to install you can install it just about anywhere with just a drag and drop it's just really great again allows infinite configurability sorry about the screaming in the background my two and a half year old has expressing himself not sure what's going on there um so so just a really great system again back to their website there's a download button right there and if you click on right here there's a bunch of free character rigs you can use the test of the system including a new version of Mac's ramaya with the auto with the advanced skeleton rig in there all these are available for your use for projects again as long as you're not making money but great for playing around and practice the one that we're gonna be working with today is taken from here which is called the tuner rig I've basically reconfigured it a little bit for a better a better facial rig but it's ultimately the same the same model so you can play with it there as well finished version without further ado let's go ahead and get into it the files I associated with this tutorial which are available online for you to download grab them right here see we just have the tuna mesh the tuna mesh rig our tuna mesh geometry which we'll be working with the advanced skeleton folder which I downloaded from their website which includes notes on how to install it as well as the most amore the most important one they installed on mal which is how you actually install it on your computer let's begin with that one I already have it installed on mine as well as the file opened up but I'll show you how this works if you're installing it for the first time it's as simple as you just need to open up a custom shelf our new shelf you can go to file new shelf name it I'll call mine a a skeleton it's already have an advanced skeleton shelf up here so it creates a new shelf and then you literally just drag your installed mail into the window let go and it'll pop up for here right away make sure that if you've done that issues save all shelves otherwise next time you open up Maya you'll have to reinstall it but since installing it takes about five seconds not a big deal at the workshop a lot of people had trouble getting it to show up and it was because they hadn't unzipped the file so when you download the package that I sent to you guys online it's going to be this one zip file you have to unzip this and inside that zip file I'll probably fix it for when I put it back on they have a double check there was another zip file in it you have to unzip all those before any of this will work you can't actually run a zip file you have to always unzip it first even though you can look through it so keep that in mind cuz I can shrink that down so once you once you get it up and running you want to make sure you're on your your new shelf hit this v button right here which will pop open the advanced skeleton controls over here on the left side of Maya if you want there's an undocked button here you can click on if you want to put this if you're working on a dual monitor setup for now it's gonna leave it docked you can also check for updates and update through the actual plugin it's really well it's really well set up I should mention before we jump into it there are a few downsides to the system but again better than any system I have I've used to date so there are some bugs in it that I've run into if you don't do things the way it wants you to do it can crash it so I do recommend not crash it but it'll just not function and they use often that means kind of going back to a previous save version and because of that I recommend that you save out many versions as you go I'm just even to go back into your work but I'd also mentioned it's more flexible in that way than any other system I've used most of them you have once you start going through the controls and the options you can't stop and this one you can stop at any point save it out and just start back from there the same position you finished it later which is really really great so just be prepared it's not it's not perfect I might also say if you do run into bugs you can you through the Facebook page email the guy that made it and he will respond almost immediately he's great so I've had really great luck in that regard I also say the body regen system is pretty solid I haven't run into issues with that it's sometimes gonna be hard to figure out what you need to do all the documentation is built into the system so you'll see this little question marks here and these question marks pop up these windows which tell you what you should be doing I they're great for the most part but sometimes there's a little bit that I don't know and it kind of comes down to a little bit of trial and error to figure out exactly what you should doing or what you should be doing to get the best results again part of the reason why I'm doing this tutorial the other other downside which I haven't figured out a way around yet is that the body rig works best on a symmetrical body but it doesn't have to be if you want to do an asymmetrical body it just means more more time spent getting it just right the facial break however in this case I have the facial the body the facial word separate from the body I found really doesn't work without a symmetrical face which is which is too bad I hope at some point he implements an asymmetrical face rigor let me certainly suggest it since most great sculpts are asymmetrical you can at this point you could add in a blend shape afterwards to make the face asymmetrical which I'll if I have time I'll demonstrate but ultimately at this point if your face is not symmetrical it'll give you issues I've also found that you need to even though he says you do not need to include all the required face face parts in this case and close these things up so I remembers at your last position which includes the right eye left eye face tongue and teeth I found even though these are technically optional I find if you don't include them the facial rig at least in my last version got upset and wouldn't work but not hard you can even put in a fake teeth and tongue just a placeholder it'll still work as long as that's something to connect to all right so aside from that though it really is a fantastic system I think a lot of you will get some great use out of it the fact that once you get comfortable with it you could rig and rig an entire body and do facial controls and likely under 30 minutes is is really great my guess is if you're really fast it you could even do it faster than that but it takes a little practice so because I'll be talking through it it'll probably be a good hour as my guess hopefully we'll get through it a little faster if I can keep myself moving so let's see let me do a quick overview of the controls we're looking at we're gonna be just focusing on the body right now so the body section so I'm sorry pre we're focusing the body for the first part of this on the face I'll do as a separate video but it'll just be connected to this if you want to watch them back-to-back the pre section just gets your model ready to go there are some tools in here just to to you can create a selection and a a UI user interface that you can pop up through a window here there's plus there's this cool plugin this poser designer which allows you just save out poses and a walk designer which allows you to do quick setup walks with a quickly it's actually a lot of fun to use but actually a great way to test the rig and make sure things are working well and then a few options here actually no options necessities when you're getting ready to finish the rig off for changing display options optimizing the rig and finally publishing it and then under the demo section you can download different rigs here from online and play with them so these are all the rigs they have available you can actually open these up and go ahead and play with them so and then of course of course the About section which I showed before to update and dock undock the whole system alright so we're gonna jump into a texturing I'm texturing rigging tuna I'm definitely having my outline or open through this whole whole operation it's a best way to be able to select things quickly it makes a much faster work when working with the advanced skeleton window so I'll be going back and forth using this button over here to make my outliner visible and not visible also be using my perspective window plus my 4v4 port view to do a lot of my operations here so without further ado here we go if you go to the pre section there's a few buttons here for the most part these windows work by just starting on the first button and working your way down so here we go the first thing I need to do is clean the model a good model even on your own you should do some cleaning before you even bring it in here is my recommendation a good model you'd want to have your everything named so you can see over here everything is named carefully right and left I have the head group under a separate section here which makes a little bit easier to find things not necessary but nice but everything name lastly also knows as I click on the mesh everything is zeroed out I'm just really important and there's no history and that's vital if you have history on anything in your model rigging on anyway Auto rating or a regular rigging will completely will stop working right away so you have to have everything cleaned up that way I'm just to show you how to do it yourself can also use a system obviously naming you can just put things over here in the outliner double click and name them your name them or do it over here in the channel box over here to delete history we go to ashram shirt sorry first we should freeze transformations so modify freeze transformations will zero everything out it will turn your rotates and translate to zero your scales to one and visibility to on and then we would go to edit delete by type and history and that will get rid of any history and all the things we have selected notice that I selected everything over here and the outliner sometimes when you're selecting things over here you'll just get the top node as opposed to actually all the individual points of mesh so we want to get everything here I'm not a start you'll see it says group your model so that you have one top node and name this group geo then use the model or cleanup tool or cleaner tool this is absolutely required so you select everything I'm gonna try actually I have these eye locators here which will help us later on find the center of the eye look the center of the eyes I'm gonna go ahead and group those in here as if they're geometry and hopefully this will work out so call this geo as required I'll choose model clean we don't need to create the top node already did it so I'll just set the clean button it gives me a warning that I'm not using Arnold which is fine it looks like it ripped out my head head group so I reloaded in tuna the original mesh this is actually I was gonna clean this up and just take that error out but it's actually good to start off this way and show you that you do have to stick to the plan of advance skeleton if you try to do your own thing often it'll because the the plugin is looking for specific things in the outliner if it finds something it doesn't expect it can cause it to not work so in this case my grouping the eye locators in there caused it to run into an error so just note if you do things your own way or tried to kind of rig as you go with tools that you know it might mess up the system it so in this case if I do it the way it tells me to that's the good thing if you do things away it tells you to it will work correctly so here if I select my original geometry and hit G oh just like it told me to and do the model clean up and clean everything works just fine you'll notice it got rid of those locators that I put in there it did not like them I'm gonna import them later to use them again and then get rid of them so it should still not be an issue I'm gonna I'll make those look hairs available for those of you who want to try this out and and make the eyes a little bit easier to do so good lesson stick to the plan that it is described here and you'll have the better results if you try to do your own thing make sure to say it first before you try it out just in case something goes wrong you can always go back and start again from your last step not a problem and actually a gate again a great benefit for this software at this point I'll hit the next button again just keep going down the line I'll hit new scene Oh it'll ask me to Save Changes it's probably good idea to save to save your changes into a new file this will work fine though for right now alright and now I choose reference it already knows I'm sorry it's gonna ask you for the name of the file so here's to mesh if you want to I could just make a new copy of this just to be safe call working are cleaned I would be smarter so I'll choose that one open and now we're ready to go so you'll notice that when it's referenced in here it creates a layer that's templated so if you hit the T it'll go to R which allows you to see it but not select it if you have this off you can select the geometry which in this case is going to work against you and then template mode which is just the wireframe which is nice allows us to see through it some of you might prefer to after you work with the reference mode but go to x-ray so you can see through it this way I'll start out with template mode I tend to prefer that alright so we can now go over to the body section oh by the way for those of you who are unfamiliar with referencing referencing is just a matter of creating a link to another file instead of importing stuff into it so you'll notice there's this little blue dot next to where it says model geo that means that everything in this folder or in this little group is not actually in the file it's just linked to from another file the advantage of this is is I can only do so much this before it will give me it will stop me I keeps me from breaking the original geometry are doing anything too too nasty to it later on when we finished the rig it'll create a file that we will reference into our animations and that will keep your animators from breaking the rig which is how all productions have ever worked on function it also allows you to make changes to the rig or changes to the model and automatically update all your animations you will see over here under file reference editor you'll see this is the file that were referencing you know is unclick it to unreferenced it you can always right click in reference reload reference or create a new reference replace the reference it's actually a really great system if you need to make a new reference yourself you can always just click on create reference this way as well alright so we're done with the pre section that's clean and ready to go and now we can go ahead and start building now even though we haven't done much I'm gonna go ahead and save this out it's my first step just wanted to go back and do any of that that's set up so I'll call this tuna mesh rig I'll body rig since we're gonna do a facial regulator a body rig oh one and as I go through it I do something I want to save I'll just save it as Oh 2 O 3 and increment that all the way through the sections that we're looking at through here are fit which is to get the initial skeleton in here that's that it takes the most time and then build which actually build the skeleton you have multiple options for creating skinning which is the deform section the geometry section allows you to make a low-res skeleton low res mesh as well so that if you have a very dense mesh which is slow to animate with you can switch have your animator switch over to a low res version and animate at full speed there's also options here for motion capture rigs game skeleton rigs which I haven't used I think their unity unreal this is unreal based to skeleton rig which is great the control curve section allows you later on to replace your the controls in the character and then the control mesh I actually I should talk about these later on when we're closing them and finishing so let's just stick to the fit there's lots of options in here I'm not going to go through all of them Iceland can do online I want to go through the basic operation of creating biped rig right up here you can basically import skeleton templates this allows you to a biped a bendy biped a game biped you can read the rest of these but kind of gives you a starting place to work with you can also make your own and save them in here for right now we're just gonna do the basic biped I'm gonna import it it already comes the great foot rig so the extra limbs here are if you have extra feet or hands or something you can add these in and it will immediately add in a rig that you can then connect to so that's kind of nice that's actually really nice too now once you make your changes you can export and that's where you get to save out your new configuration so here we are with the basic rig it's just on one side of the body what we're gonna do is place one side and we're done it'll automatically mirror it over which is great if you haven't done any rigging before there's a it's good to note the best way to rig is using orthographic views the front side and top view and use your perspective if you're if you're going to be in here the best can be doing is making sure that you're using the arrows here to keep things on the axis you'll also note I didn't do this here that for your geometry for good bending you want to you want enough geometry on your rig I guess I should have mentioned this before you want enough geometry that you can get some nice bends if you don't have enough geometry and then you use no matter how good the rigging system is you'll get poor poor bends around the knees the hips the elbows etc I forgot to also mention you'll notice my character is smack in the middle of the grid that's not by chance that's where you want to rig from especially when you do flipping operations like when you duplicate all the hands and everything across the bones it'll work best when that character is symmetrical I didn't mention it but also really important is you want your feet to be flat on the ground or as flat as you possibly can you'll note that if i zoom way in here tow is actually off-the-grid as is the heel which will create some some some weirdness when we do the the final sorry the final rig you want generally when you when the animator zeros out the foot for the foot for the animator to be able to comfortably assume the foot is flat on the ground plane so even this a little bit of change here from front to back would actually cause some issues which I'll actually leave like this and demonstrate so it's easy enough to flatten that foot out and not have these issues later on alright so so I'll switch back over to template mode and get ready to place my skeleton now as I was getting ready to say when you're working with rig if you haven't done this before the best thing you can do is just translate joints so if you click on a joint which you can just do by a drag box to the middle of it you don't have to click or write on this circle that becomes kind of annoying and slow to do you can also once you've selected a joint they're all in a hierarchy you can use the up and down arrow key to jump through them which makes things a little faster to the regular translate will I to move joints around which is the best way to place a joint use my undo undo key to move that back you can also if you're in the move tool selected joint and press insert you'll see it gives you this box and you can move just that joint by itself now I have my settings I'll give you a little tip here I have my settings in Maya if you go to if you go to window settings and preferences preferences and then over here in your manipulator section or is that I'm going to be later so up here I have the move rotate scale tool switch and selection change set to reset to view plane handle reset the view plane handle on both of these and what that does is whenever I select anything it never remembers where it used to be which means it's the default selection no arrow is highlighted which means at any point I can middle mouse click on any part of the window and select this without being directly on it which seems like a small thing but when you get to this controller here it's often easy when you're trying to grab from the middle it's easy just select a bunch of other things and it's much easier for to default so grabbing the the middle and then I can just middle mouse click without ever having to click on it especially since most the time I'm just going to be translating freehand with you again you should only be doing if you're an orthographic for you if you translate freehand in the perspective view this could be bad news because you're actually moving on all three axes at the same time which you can see up here but in the orthographic views you're only ever moving on to axes at once despite what it says here it's probably some an object mode yeah well it doesn't seem to matter that is odd Oh cuz we're in the joint space so that's always gonna be a little bit different I'm assuming that's what's going on but either way you can safely middle mouse click and drag here and you know you're just moving on that one plane which is good alright so at this point we can start placing things if you do have to rotate a joint it's okay let's something to avoid if you don't have to do it scaling is something to be avoided we've granted some issues with that in the workshop so I'd avoid scaling anything if you have to if you want to make a joint be bigger grab it and make it bigger this way in general the more you understand anatomy and where bones actually reside in the human body or in animal body the better the movement you'll end up with the great news of you if you mess up you can easily go back and fix it later with the advanced skeleton system but you will find because characters are often dramatized or abstracted that ultimately you there is no perfect real-life Anatomy equivalent for some characters or for some bones and for those when you're unsure the best thing to do is keep it to the middle so in this case the middle of the leg is going to give me a better representation despite the fact that a real hip actually is more over to the side and then comes over if you do that with a with Miya Miya rigging system you end up with some really strange movements some really strange strange rotations things you can fix out if you know what you're doing but in an auto rigging system better to average things out a little bit so you'll often see me cheating towards the middle of the mesh to get better results okay I'm the first thing you need to do is set your the position of your route this is the center of your characters of all your characters movement and generally the route goes right here at the right kind of right right around the bellybutton kind of at the center of the hip line so right about here is normal you can keep it a little bit lower if you want definitely don't go too high and also make sure from a side view that we're also in the middle of the mesh so I'm thinking about where the back's gonna end up later and that's actually pretty decent again I'm gonna be changing all those things but that's pretty close right there you'll find that some joints are easier to place from the side then from the front that's totally fine so in this case you'll see it's kind of hard to see where the knee is but if you look from the side here it's very obvious that the knees right there so I'm just gonna grab this and move it to right there actually I don't I don't really care if it's right on the geometry in the inside we'll never see that at least my for what I have planned so that probably doesn't matter double check that it looks good from the front which it does now you'll note here it's about to say you'll note that it's a nice straight line and I'll see right now that it's not you do want to try to keep your your joints in any I K system planar so this leg will end up being an I K leg same thing the arm and by planar what I mean is I don't want to move this joint way out so we have an angle here but then also have it out on an angle here and then have this on a different rotation like this now we see is there's no one plane that I can put through all this art I can't draw a straight line through these things so you'll notice that this this this system joins us on this plane and the foot is on this plane that's multi-planar and ultimately is going to create some really bad results so the best thing you do can you can rotate this whole system out like this you can rotate it in although it's nicer to keep it straight for your animators as long as it's all in one plane it'll operate normally if you make a mistake again you can go back and fix it but nicer does not have to if you do like if you note here how it's not straight anymore you can always use the grid I'll actually can snap to grid to make sure this is actually a perfect straight line which is a nice trick and I'll put it back here I think what I've shown you guys the hips I got it a little bit off so again I'm gonna try to line it up here with the knee and then I can move the hip separately I'm gonna work really work just on moving it up and down so it's still right above the knee your hips if you feel for that kind of bone in your hips um that's that's the top of your that's the top of your hip bone right here and you can see that your your leg actually is hinging from right right in here which actually is somewhat even though the bone is over to the side which it is still over the knee all this the fact that the bones of the side does create a different kind of movement than if it was straight but for our purposes we're basically looking for that where that hip bone would be and then coming down just a little bit and above the crotch so some were kind of right in between that line is about where we're gonna get good movement but again for every character you get to play a little bit to see what works best and the type of movement you want for your character so in this case I'm not too far off I'm probably a little bit high so I'm gonna pull down oops use the insert mode so it's just the hip and pull down I picture his hip bone being right about here where it protrudes and kind of between there and the crotch right about there I guess I should say groin not crotch and this might be a little bit a little bit high as well so again insert mode and I'll pull that down just a little bit all right so the knee is placed on I should note that it's okay if you move this knee in and out as necessary because this as long as you're straight up and down in the other view you will be planar in this case I have a little bit of Bend there not much I'm also not on the knee so here I'll freehand place it right there if you do have a character that has a leg at an angle also not a big deal usually I do is set it up so it's close rotate it out and as I make changes here I'll use object mode to make sure that I can move directly in line with the joint system and keep things planar the hotkey for that is if you hold in w4 translate holding your left mouse button you can get this popup menu which allows you to switch from world to object mode as necessary so actually I'll stay in object mode for right now all right so the ankle if you feel that nub on your ankle that protrusion on the on the outside that's about where your ankle hinges from so looking at trying to get the right placement I tend to find this is a little bit easier from a side view so I'm just gonna place the entire foot so right about here will give a nice rotation these guys here I you don't want to do anatomically correct the toe end literally goes right on the end of the toe now this is where I said before you'd want your geometry to be absolutely perfect so literally right where the toe meets the ground in this case that doesn't exist you can experiment with putting it up here where it meets the ground so probably like it should meet here but my again my experiences animators will tend to find tend to expect when they have the foot zeroed out that they're on that level ground plane same thing with the heel again you can see here I can't do it because the heel is through the ground so I'm just gonna cheat and choose the actual ground plane I'll show you what issues this causes later ideally the geometry would be flat I should also double check from the top view that we're actually on the furthest point out of the heel pretty tough to see but I can always hide my mesh that I don't need to be looking at right now so here I can hide all this mesh by selecting it in the outliner pressing ctrl H for a hide and then quickly I can go ahead and make sure that I'm really at the furthest point back on the heel over here um I guess and then if the ankle keep that straight for the toe I'll keep it the furthest point out here in the toe and then I'll average that out with this ball the foot so the ball of it I want to try to keep it somewhat centered now the ball of foot is gonna end up being where your foot bends and I get different results with this and most rigging systems I've used I prefer the ball to be on the ground as well so it's rotating from back here that's at this point you might want to play around seeing how it looks from the middle I've gotten good results both ways so see what works best for you I'm gonna go ahead and try the bottom and again it's something I can easily adjust later on oops don't do that again don't rotate your joints if you can avoid it there we go so I'm just gonna try to get this right on the grid right there I'm switch over to object a world mode so now I can slide this back and forth into the point where I want that shoe to fold which would be right about here this the pinky and the big toe are where you're gonna be a little Bank the foot from left to right so what I generally want to do here gently give me to the side of the ball but you really want to look for kind of the furthest point out on this shoe so here I'll put my pinky toe right about here on the furthest point out of the shoe and then the big toe the same thing so for this point out of the shoe is right there now it might be to this shoe from the front view curves a bit in which case that means and it does which case I'd want to cheat this in a little bit right about in here somewhere so as the foot rolls over on the side on the mesh doesn't go right through the ground so probably somewhere right in here would give me the best results again something you're gonna want to experiment with um this one's a little bit more difficult you see there's a big space in here this is where it connects but I'd only give you about 15 degrees to rotate the foot if you put it there so I'm gonna go ahead and cheat this out again why it's nice to kind of keep the bottom of your foot and they get a little bit flatter than you would normally so that bryggen can be a little tighter but an animator can always compensate it's just nice to make their job easier when you can alright so the foot is placed and ready to Gail as I mentioned I'm gonna save a lot as I go through this so I'm going to choose gonna compress control shift H to unhide what I last hid it's a great trick so just unhides whatever I hit last I'm gonna head just save and for this one I'll choose body rig o - if you want you could also say body rig you know like done foot done but it's fine here I'm gonna work my way up the body a nice thing to note here is course on a normal scale attend on normal skeleton we don't have a side view here sorry the skeleton has a sort of an S curve to the spine we can kind of see this here as it curves forward back and then up into the neck don't do this when you rig this is one of those times when following human anatomy directly is not not a good plan you tend to find that if it curves one way here another way here when you want the and when the animator wants to rotate the whole body forward the joints aren't confused but they operate better if they're more in a straight line going forward or back not some pointing forward and some pointing backwards so that's just my experience if you're working out I'm working on my 2017 it might be that later on this changes but I doubt it so here it's gonna get my my chest about where I want it which would be towards the middle the chest of course and an actual Anatomy let's pull us back up again the spine is more towards the back of the body which will produce more realistic rotations but it tends to create more problems in the mesh up here in the chest unless you're gonna put in a lot of pieces there to hold the skin and make it move correctly like an actual rib cage so here if you're not gonna put in helper knows they are plan to put in blend shapes it's a little smarter to go ahead and cheat more towards the middle find a balance point in there where you'll get realistic rotations but you won't get tons of problems the skin up here and I'm just gonna average out this one here in the middle to be somewhere in the middle of these two guys but again more in a straight line that typical s-curve that were used to seeing they were used to seen with real human anatomy you'll notice that advanced skeleton will automatically keep these joints centered you actually can't move them left and right this is on purpose there's a lock in here somewhere I forget where it is a lock middle on you can turn that off if that's not what you want but typically that's exactly what you want so I'm gonna leave that there you want your your spine joints to be equally spaced as well as you can so I can probably lower that so chest let's see here chest should be kind of towards the lower part of the back toriel's are kind of you know right around when the nipples would be tends to produce a pretty good result and this one here again averaged out between the two i press insert so i can slide it separately the base of the neck I'll work my way up should be at the base of the neck so right here we're looking at right about in here produces pretty good results against lean you're probably you're probably need to play with and then the head this is one that a lot of people mess up but your head actually rotates from right here kind of just below the ear going back to our Anatomy drawings you can see it's best on the side so you can see you can picture the ear right up here if you draw a line out from the eye you can see that the the neck actually connects all the way up in here and that's where our head and skull rotate from so that's where we want to connect to this will definitely create a weird rotation if you don't do this correctly this is one you want to be anatomically correct as you can if you have a more cartoony character that's just essentially a sphere stuck on a little pipe for a neck then put it right where the sphere and the pipe the neck meet these joints are the jaw I I've gotten different results with this I'm ultimately we're not going to use it anyway because we're going to use the head the the face the face rigging which disregards this joint but if you're doing this an Tamaki correct which I usually recommend the jaw rotates from just in front of the ear right about here and then normally of course then the jawbone is this one piece here where you place this whether it goes in the jaw or the mouth doesn't really matter as long as it's hinging from back here and again it won't matter for us since ultimately that's not how we're gonna be skinning it anyway for the eye controls you do want to get these spot-on you can either do it well by eye trying to get this first one on center this one's ultimately gonna end up right through from the eye you want to make sure this is correct in every view so if I come up here you'll see that this is not centered here and it becomes tough because most characters don't have their their eyes are usually at an angle as you can kind of see here they sort of point out it's pretty tough to see I'll hide everything about the eyes so you guys can see it better let's see here grab all these do you select the eyes and will hide oh I hit the head Group two there we go so you can see that the eyes are kind of of an angle which makes it a little bit harder to Center this and this is where I mentioned before I have locators to make this job a lot easier I can actually literally hide the eyeballs - and here's we're gonna cheat a little bit I'm gonna import some locators now as I mentioned if you're gonna try something a little bit outside of the the advanced skeleton setup it's a good idea to save first just in case it doesn't like it and you end up having to start back from Ground Zero so here I saved it out I'll choose import I have this eye locators here I'm gonna go ahead and bring these in there they're hidden unhide them by pressing shift H so this tells me exactly the center of my eyes the nice thing here is either but you know now doing this by eye is much easier I can zoom in here and get a smack on the center of the locator if you know how to do snapping even easier I can literally just snap it on there and I'm done in seconds I'll make these eye locators available for you guys to to make your job a little bit easier you can also you could also snap this to the sent to this line here oh it doesn't consider that an edge it doesn't matter anyway since the eye is not pointing straight forward so I'll show that as i unhappy I'm just to keep advance Skelton happy I'm going to delete those locators are just brought in and it's remembered not to move this now that I have it placed so I'll bring my eyeballs back just by themselves and now I just want to place this one right in the middle of the iris that's actually easy to do first from up from here I can actually see where it is and get it right on so I'm gonna zoom in there the closer you get this to correct the better it'll be so I'm just zooming in here you can use your right mouse button and alt to zoom in you can also hold in ctrl alt and left mouse button to do a drag window and it'll zoom into that exact window which I found a lot of people asking me about I guess I could snap on the point here too but this is fine okay and then I'll double check from my top view to make sure it's sitting on the front of the iris it's not so I'll move it straight back until it lines up that should keep its placement just right so there we go let me double check and again make sure that it's still sitting right in the middle of the iris it is so so this one's perfectly centered this one's smack in the middle of the iris we are good to go so the eyes setup again since I don't want to do that again I'm gonna go ahead and say that out it's a good general rule is if you do something you don't want to have to repeat save and save as a new version you can also turn an autosave ur not a bad idea this means you can't save different names okay let's go ahead and work into the arm what I used to like to do here the clavicle doesn't matter right now it's mostly the shoulder that we really want to get get correct so I will unhide all these things by selecting them in the outliner pressing shift H I'm gonna go grab my shoulder I forgot to mention by the way advanced skeleton does a nice thing by naming these that's not normal to see a name above a joint so it's really cool that that's added in it makes it easier to see where things should be placed now the shoulder is a weird one it's hard to get perfect you're never going to get perfect rotations or movements on the shoulder because if so many muscle systems working here to create the right movement in the skin so uh we're gonna cheat this we're gonna cheat it in two ways if you were to do a really serious high-end rig you would actually put the shoulder where it's supposed to go I'll pull my Anatomy here you can see the shoulders rotating actually this is pretty close to where we're gonna put it you're basically looking for the rounded part of the shoulder here you know even though that the shoulder bones up here it's sitting a little bit lower so kind of towards the top of the shoulder and kind of you're looking for that radius and sort of aiming kind of in the middle of it if you're gonna cheat one way the other it's better to cheat out towards the shoulder than cheat back in towards the body they'll create weird folding in here so whenever in doubt it's best to start with where it should be in an atomically correct skeleton and then work your way towards something more abstract more balanced for your abstracted model as things don't move the way you want them to so here you can even see the shoulder isn't really rounded like a normal shoulder partly because this arm is straight so I'm gonna guess that right around in here is gonna be if this shoulder were down would be kind of in that radius again if you get too high you can get lots of weird folding down here and if you get too low you're gonna get lots of weird folding up top so if you're ever unsure better to put it towards the middle of the mesh even though a real shoulder is a little bit higher in this case though I need these things to be planar just like we did with a leg so I'm gonna actually try to get my wrist and my elbow in the middle of the skeleton in the middle of the arm so right about here should produce pretty good results for the whole arm if you have a good model or they should have already tried to get the arm nice and straight it'll make your job easier on the rigging a little good rigger should be able to accommodate almost any any orientation of the arm and if you need to if your rig has a arm that's pointed down which actually a little bit nicer to skin you can just rotate the whole thing together again you want to try to keep these bones in a line so I'm gonna start with the shoulder right there we'll see how we do again if you have to cheat in one direction but I cheat out a little bit then she in towards the body you'll tend to get better results I'm gonna go ahead and do the elbow and then the wrist so the elbow again it's fine if you're at an angle in this direction but you could only be at an angle in one of the directions and you're always gonna want to have the elbow angled back a little bit just so that I can knows which way to solve itself so I'll aim for right about in the middle here we can see where the elbow rotates well I find with this model the elbow folds right there but from this view the elbow looks better if it folds a little bit ahead of that so kind of right in here feels a little more natural for me at least my my elbow my actual arm folds more from the wider part of the arm rather than from this narrow part here and I tend to find that when I if I do this rig with the joint here it looks a little strange so I'll cheat it kind of in the middle those two again you can change it later if you need to I made the mistake of going up I don't want this to go up I'm sorry that's fine we're in the Lea we're in the front view so I don't want to go up here that would suddenly make this whole thing planar because it's already got an angle in the top view so so right about there and then the wrist which is a little bit easier so you're kind of looking for this transition point between the arm and the hand because it's right about here again right in the middle and then from the this view this should already be centered oops it's not because I move this up yeah remember you want to keep this all in a line to keep these planar so that's about what I want it's a nice straight line yes the wrist is a little higher that a little bit lower you're you're basically trying to find you're trying to compensate and find a happy medium if the wrist doesn't Bend right it'll be pretty obvious if you need to bend up a little bit you could probably get away with it but you're going to start to get weird rotations on the elbow so just be prepped for it it's better to have that elbow planar I'm gonna stick to it all right so wrist is placed now we didn't do the clavicle so I'm gonna go back and do that and also I noticed my shoulder is way off here so I'm gonna insert press insert and get my shoulder oops insert and get my shoulder in the middle of the shoulder which should be right about here at this point it might actually be helpful to jump into my perspective view and try to look at it there this is well as times when it might be helpful more helpful go to your normal shaded mode choose x-ray and try to look at the mass here as you're trying to approximate it so about like that turn off x-ray back to template all right now I place my clavicle last my personal preference is to actually do the clavicle correctly where it is anatomically oops wrong wrong button my apologies so here if you see the clavicle right here this call it the collarbone connects to the top of the shoulder over here and hinges from right here and you can actually feel on your chest right at the base of your throat where where that connects so this is where you want to rotate from for a normal shrug either forward forward back up or down so that I actually want to get correct so I'll do from this view first now this one does not have to be planar so I'm just gonna hit insert again so it's moving without moving the rest of the joints I just placed so we're looking at probably right about here just off to the side with those bones connect and then from the front view it actually does connect a little bit farther forward not just beneath the skin but a little bit farther back from right in there but not in a perfect line with everything that will create some weirdness as well again you'll notice you tend to it's tend to be easier to fold your shoulders forward than it does back so it's not necessary to have it kind of in the center so the back looks as good as forward we want the forward to look correct so that's actually pretty good right there okay and you'll notice just like it like we've seen the skeleton the base the neck is just above the collarbone and we're pretty close to that - from my initial placement for the base of the neck so we're doing good we're - the last part here which ultimately is the hand to be safe I'll save again and now I'll place the hand now the hand definitely takes some time there's a lot of joints here so just sit down get comfortable get ready and work your way through it one bit at a time so a good thing to do is just place the handed joints of the finger first so note that just gonna make a little room here so you can that we can reckon you see we're doing note that actually gets us to be easier in this view non templated so note that while your finger you know we have this the finger the little v here in between the finger is to stop right here the fingers actually your knuckles are right back here right across here and that's the base of each finger rotates from so that's good to keep in mind whether your characters cartoony or not if you don't have it there it's gonna look really weird if your finger if it rotates from too far forward your thumb is also kind of weird it's sort of a giant mega finger if you want to think of it that way we have a joint right about here we have a joint right here and then the last one is actually way back in here so you can actually see it on our Anatomy I'm zooming here kind of an ugly way but you can actually see here your fingers fold from right here but your thumb folds from all the way back here just in front of the wrist where the other fingers actually connect so that makes that one a little bit special and a little different one to pay attention to so let's keep that in mind otherwise I've seen some really bad hand rotations and something that immediately is obvious when you're animating that something's off when it moves or when you're posing it so again for each one my fingers I'm just gonna line it up forth about where the knuckle would be this is the one time I'll rotate I'll go ahead and rotate unless I of course I did with the arms or legs I'll rotate these in place understand do them all in one view first and they'll rotate in the other view as well so again the knuckle should be right about here I'll rotate in place working my way through I'm gonna ahead and pause the video and finish this up right my hand joints are placed and now for the thumb joint for the thumb joint this one you got to do a little more freehand but I always start with the thumb about where it should be so it's gonna rotate from right about here again kind of aiming for the middle of the the mesh from the other view I'm just gonna sort of perspective view there's one of those times when actually that again that x-ray mode might work to your advantage if you switch over just keep that on might make it a little bit easier to see when you're in the middle of the skin but it's never totally easy so that's pretty good actually but the important thing here is I switch to rotate you'll notice that [Music] actually off you'll notice the thumb actually will rotate naturally in this direction here but yet if you look at the joint it's rotating on this axis which is pretty odd I want these two to line up so much you're going to go ahead and rotate this one on this axis as well no no way these are things that you would not want to do with your joints but in this case this will create a nicer looking joint and I'll rotate that down so it's more in the middle of the skin so right around there I'm going to go with that a little bit again pretty tough to see but once you get used to it you'll be able work it out and then this is probably the hardest part of it consume notice now that that that joint the system of joints now rotate in the same axis of the thumb and we'll get a nice smooth rotation on there you notice that these are sticking out so I'm gonna go ahead here just while I'm at it like you well actually maybe I won't I said normally what I do is I go ahead and rotate these down to line up with the actual finger but it almost doesn't make sense just because I'm gonna be changing the location of each one of these joints joints in just a second so and I'm gonna do it from the top view so here's my preferred method I'm switching but a template mode it's gonna work through my joints and take each one moving it to where it should be so that's pretty tough to see in this in this view just because of the actual sculpt doesn't have a lot of definition on the hand this is where a really well-defined hand will make this job easier I'm just gonna use the arrow keys to drop down to the next joint level and then the last one goes at the end if you need to fix joints of course you can go back to insert mode try to keep these in line as you work it'll make for a nicer folding joint as you go so I'd work through each one of these doing this sort of the same system trying to find the right place in the fingers in this case again sorry about the screaming child in the background having a rough morning so so you might you can also check from the perspective view to see if you're lining up correctly with the right points in the skin you can sometimes see the little bit better here so for example you can see this joint a little bit better from this angle which helps you kind of line up but I did a pretty good job guessing what I like to do is when I'm dumb done doing it from the top view I'll switch this view instead of rotating down for this I'm gonna go ahead and describe each joint and actually place it in the middle of the skin again you can use x-ray if you want all in this case actually it's a little bit easier without it because the joints are about the same size as the skin so I can actually see when they come through so right about here right about here and then the last one I like to put just on the tip of the finger kind of line with the other joint so right about there and again for that one I just use the arrow keys up and down moving through here so I don't the select each joint it makes a little bit faster to tweak these out and it makes sense to get these as close as you possibly can so your fingers move nicely also it's gonna flip it to the other side so if you dice work on this side it has your work for the other side so this is the slowest part by far and go ahead and stop it here and I'll pause it for a second and we'll come back when I do the thumb I'll come back just a hair earlier just to point out as I do the last finger that as I move these down into place I've already placed them correctly from the top view so these are exactly where I want I'm gonna right along the joints when I do it in this view it's really important that you grab that the Y arrow and lock it to the axes as you move it straight down if you just do it freehand you're just as likely to move it away from where you want in the top view and they need to go back and forth back and forth if you didn't reset up the manipulator preference like I did before the nice thing is if you didn't do that when you use the arrow keys and go to the next joint it'll remember the last thing you had selected and keep that Y that Y axis selected which is kind of nice but only in this type of situation everywhere else it drives me bananas all right so now we gotta do the thumb joint just make sure it's lined up so I'll go back over here so we have this one already correct so we did first we have the rotation correct so don't need to play with that the next joint is kind of right here in this random part of the thumb though the next joint is right here and this Bend of the thumb and you'll definitely find here that this thumb is not going to be straight that's just the way the thumb is it has a natural bend to it that you're not going to sculpt around but it tends not to create significant issues too many significant issues when you're rigging when you're animating my preference though is for a model to have a fairly straight thumb and then for the animator to pose the thumb with the proper Bend it creates a better deformations so again that's right now from the top view but not from the side view so here because of thumb is separate from the rest one's a little bit easier to see it's gonna get and grab that y-axis use the down arrow key to move to the joints and then line these up until I'm just right so now we're right in the middle of thumb and again going back here you can see the rotation axis is just it's actually a little bit off there we go that's a little bit better alright so there's the hand all placed elbow shoulder the whole deal clavicle this was my best guess for everything it might be off a little bit I will find out later so that's the great thing that advanced skeleton get to try it out and see how we did so let me save this out again just to be safe you definitely want to say before you do your first set your first run on the rigging I'll put something else in there so I know it's a important point maybe you'll do that's fine always remember six all right and now here the magic so if you wonder where all these other things do there's some cool functions in here I guess I should point out before I show the magic now do the magic first at this point if I go down here to the build section I can go ahead and do my build advanced skeleton when you click this it looks like maybe nothing's happening but if you see look at the mass it's kind of flickering around you'll see it's actually doing a lot of calculations here you'll see these bones flickering around and then you'll see controls pop up it's doing a ton of calculations here so there we go done so it just did in about 15 seconds maybe less probably less what it takes normally to many many hours to set up even if you have all the bones there so while the bones thing seems kind of frustrating and slow that's nothing compared to actually setting up all these control rigs and if you've never done this before you're looking at that just probably saved you right there a couple weeks worth of work this is a fully functioning rig at this point the rig does everything you need it to it has full eye kfk and the arms you have controls for everything there but what we really wanna do is see how well it works with the joint placement we just had so to make this work just right right now we would want to go ahead and do a quick skinning and just see if the deformations are wrote other the joints are rotating from the from the right place I'll do that in just a second I'll go ahead and do it now so I'm gonna jump down into the skinny menu here we'll come back to the fit menu to show you a couple other cool functions but right now we need to see that skinning now the fastest skinning method right here there's four of them is just to choose this option one which will go ahead and do a default basic Maya skinning nothing fancy here at all and you'll see just how unfair see it is in a second well this requires you to do can read it so select obviously form which in this case is gonna be everything so I'll select all objects um it probably isn't matter if you select the group I'm gonna avoid it just because you can't actually deform groups um so I scrub all the mesh this includes the eyes don't worry this is gonna be replaced later anyway I'll select deform joints button which autumn like automatically selects all the correct joints set smooth bind options which just brings up the actual standard Maya menu if you haven't been using this or don't know what you're doing just go ahead and hit edit reset my one recommendation is knock down your max influences to 3 it'll make it a little bit easier to paint weights later on if you need to do some fix up which you typically do so I'll hit apply at this point you could test this out it's not gonna look too pretty so I saw this on reference mode so I don't accidentally select the mesh but if you grab say the foot control move it you'll see lots of crazy skinning thing going on here and this is typically what happens whenever you whenever you do a normal skinning in lion it's just that's just how things are normally skin here bad bends bad elbows bad everything and the wrong skin mushing well that gets leads me to the next thing the wrong skin I'm moving when it's not supposed to so we're gonna add another skinning option here called the Delta mush which is pretty fantastic the Delta mush basically does a fast sort of deformation skinning on this whole thing all at once and as a pretty amazing job of making this look great without any effort whatsoever this is great for doing a quick test of our rig and seen if we like how it functions so to do this operation all we need to do is select our objects which in this case of course will again will be everything - the group I said ctrl to deselect that I'm you hit harden weights which apparently makes us look nicer I don't actually know it's doing I'm not familiar with a Delta mush while this will take a minute while it's doing this I'll mention there's two versions of Delta mush I think there is one in in Maya which is what its using or if you prefer you can use W B Delta mush which is a plug-in made by Webber clang which I'm guessing part is a better job I'm not sure our different job I haven't used it I should probably be trying it out but for what we're doing right now it doesn't really matter then some of the hard weights are finished I can see it's not calculating I can hit apply Delta mush it takes half a second and then we are ready to try it out at this point you can click on things and you'll see it right away they're looking pretty impressive for almost no effort you get even nice change nice adjustments in the pants you get normal folds back here you might get some funkiness like here we have multiple pieces of clothing you might get some weirdness there but for the most part your rig works for a lot of productions you could probably start animating right now and be pretty happy with the results you know you'll see things that here gonna be tweaked out but this is all pretty normal stuff on that again probably just saved us another week or so worth of skin paint skin waiting um you will notice in this case actually the head controls lost up in here if the controls aren't placed right duh maurya's they're easy to fix up later I'll show you how so here's that head control you will notice that some things really don't work right so here you'll see some really kind of funky floating on the chin it might even be worse than your model depending on where you put the jaw don't select that when we do the facial rig it'll fix it if you didn't don't do the facial rig you need to paint those weights onto the head which is about a 10 second operation I guess I'll show it to you too just to show you guys how that works but that's a really easy thing to fix and that's typically how you should how you're normally painting getting skin to work so don't fret you just save yourself so much time now here is the really cool thing about the rig if you like how everything works at this point you have a body rig ready to go you could animate um you do want to go through everything especially when those shoulders make sure that you're happy not initially with the the way the skin folds but make sure you're happy with where it's rotating from so actually looking at here to me you know watch this it looks like actually that joint is a little bit it's probably little bit low but I'm going to just deal with that so that the wrist and elbow work but to me it feels like it's a little far out I want to be - rotating from a little bit more inside the body so I'm gonna update that I want to check things like that that elbow see how that feels to me that also feels like it's folding a little far back but I do like the way it's holding the elbow so I might want to move that out a little bit um the wrist is another one that's easy kind of to get weird rotation weird movement on but actually that looks pretty good um I can go down through the fingers the whole deal make sure I like it actually good way to test those out is use this thing here you can do just the curl all at once so actually that feels pretty natural aside from what I do that check the knees check the ankle you know make sure these things rotate in a way that to you feels like it makes sense so it feels feels natural for your character whatever their design is okay so now I can go through all the controls the character you can play with that on your own but I'm actually pretty happy with this with the exception the shoulder which is great cuz it allows me to show you one of the best functions for advanced skeleton and something you just cannot do when you're doing this by yourself so this is a pretty phenomenal use advanced skeleton will allow you to go back to our build and fit section and make changes and it will still allow you to keep the skinning while you're doing this and it doesn't it doesn't create any problems whatsoever normally this is a huge hassle when you're doing it yourself here no problem at all so the way this works is we're gonna go back to our build section I'm gonna hit toggle fit advanced this will actually revert me back to this rig here the one that I originally placed and allow me to make any changes I want so everything should still be placed correctly it looks like it moved a little bit which is a little odd it sure did so I'm I might have to do a little correction there and I want to that's the first time I've seen that actually so that's a little interesting so it looks like my my wrist moved maybe my elbow too so I'm gonna actually grab my shoulder I'm not sure if I did this by mistake at one point or if it did this when I get this right back in that right back in there alright and I mentioned that I think I want the shoulder in a little bit so I'll hit insert and pull us in that's going to create some not as good deformations down here but I wanted to sacrifice a little bit for that shoulder to look right so when we do this now whatever changes you make here you need to go through and hit update now which this could actually been the source of my previous issue I forgot to hit update before building the skeleton now there's two options here it defaults to not being in fit mode which means you have to hit update which will take a second it'll go through it will actually reorient all the joints and make them line up just right it all zero out all the placements so it's now good to go so that takes a few seconds to do if you hit fit mode while you're working on the skeleton it'll update each joint as you and it's a hierarchy as you make changes but I find this is kind of slow to work in that mode so I prefer just to make all my changes and hit update now the risk is like I just did you'll forget to do it and your joints won't actually or we oriented correctly whenever you're done though you hit toggle fit advanced and basically it's going already did that sorry you hit rebuild advanced skeleton it'll rebuild I was telling me that I'm not in the build pose because I moved everything hold on so just pause for a second to check out what's happening and honestly I don't know what just happened I was worried that the skinny might have caused an issue but I just went back and I made the changes again and did the update just like I showed you guys and then did the rebuild and it worked just fine so which is what it's supposed to do so you'll see now if the joints are in a new place here they're actually where they should have been the solar was in a little bit the elbow actually did forgot to move the elbow again not easy it's not hard to to change and then the skinning should still be in place so if I were to switch over I should just be able to still grab my skin and new and check things out and see if I prefer my new shoulder placement I do like that better so even though this you know there's more movement down here to me that feels more like what I expect that shoulder to move like so that's a good thing so basically at the point at this point the process is going through checking each rotation and making sure you like how it feels if you don't like how it feels I don't worry about you know improper skin during the deformations too much it's mostly about rotation points go back in you do the same operation you toggle toggle back to the fit skeleton you make your changes you update rebuild as many times as you like until you get the actual rig working the way you want it to it's a really awesome system and then great especially when you're starting out trying to figure out where the best placement of each of these joints are especially in the elbows shoulders wrists kind of everywhere the spine the head all these things at this point I'm gonna go ahead and save it out because I know I'm getting close to something I do like assuming you like what you have I'll probably go back and make a few changes later we would now go through the rest of the system which I'll show you to clean up and get this thing ready to animate now before I go into talking about the different options for skinning I should mention one of the thing here back in the fifth section which is kind of cool and may be of use to some of you while you're putting your your bones in there there's this option here for display if you click on this checkbox here it'll create geometry that matches the length and size of each one of your your joints here and kind of allows you to sort of figure out where things should be going I find it works out it's fairly helpful the best thing about it is it creates these planes that actually show you how plane your leg is you can see how this is actually right where my my um knee control ends up same thing back here it's right where my elbow control would end up for an Ikea system so it kind of helps you let let you know how how well you got your your joints to be planar you can also switch between cylinders our boxes or pretty cool bones to to see how things are are looking in your and the actual skeleton are in the actual placement inside your mesh so a pretty cool thing the one I think I do notice is if I try to get rid of the geometry it does keep the planes I don't know why I'm sure it's I'm guessing it's a bug but not a big deal once you go to again your your update now and do your build that all disappears so I'll do that again just to make it go away but a nice function when you're trying to figure out where things go and again made perhaps less aware of how the the skeleton should look so rebuilding I'll pause what I do this part it's also worth noting I think I mentioned before but if you don't like the placement our size or shape of your controls these are all things you can change later on in this the clavicles because of how I placed some way inside here they're they're oriented a little funky but basically in the case to me that the programmer felt like the clavicles should have been somewhere else but this is where as an animator where I prefer them so going on into the deform section now we did a really fast skinning with that option 1 followed by the Delta mush this is naturally going to create an imperfect skin but for the fast you know the person that just needs stuff done and done now it's pretty hard to beat but you'll notice things like if you look at the fingers and you know he Reich looking at how those curves it doesn't retain the rigidity of a knuckle like it should even though our joints placed correctly might be a little far back but really that comes out of the fact that we're just asking a lot from the system we're asking for it to recognize and perfect something that we didn't really have much control over that's just the nature of a fast skinning like we did it's pretty amazing that works this well the truth is you need to go back there and use standard paint skin paint leaned skin paint waiting to get this just right or try one of these other options so the other options here for skinning there's a skin cage which basically allows it's a pretty cool system you basically create the cage and it brings in a whole systems of boxes that allows you to choose the size and volume and placement of each body part according to your character and then it copies the weights over from those boxes to the actual mesh does a pretty nice job actually and there's different options there to sort of create better looking skin in the past is what I've used to actually do my final skinning but the Delta mush is actually a new thing that gets me pretty close pretty fast for a faster job the sub wrap creates sort of deformers that do the same sort of thing and then the skin loops is probably one of the best options actually allows you to choose a specific loop on the body so for example you can say I want the the elbow to fold from right here and it will make a bend right there and it does a really nice job there too but it requires that your geometry be totally solid your loops be totally Sol you have great edge loops across the board which you'd want anyway but you might find that you don't have exactly what you need when you trying to do this method so it requires really good mesh these are the options here the geometry skeleton poly boxes mannequin this allows you to create additional low res geometry which you can put on a separate layer and then your animators can use this to animate if your mesh is too too heavy to make animation a little faster if you're gonna do some like this my recommendation of course is always is to save this out since we're coming up on the end I tell you to say you know body rig finished one so we know it's a new stage and then you can go ahead and create some of these new things the various I'll do this in a second but the other options here the control curves allow you to actually create a new curve the one that you prefer you can import them in you can swap the curve out you can do whatever you want and it will it will fix it for you I've changed scale the whole deal it's actually some really really great functions in here set colors whatever you want most Auto burgers I've seen don't lie to change the controls just because it's too annoying for them to set up but this allows you do whatever you want um control mesh is a really neat idea that from my computer hasn't worked cuz it's my computer just isn't fast enough but maybe in yours it would work basically this does is you just click on [Music] control you click on create control mesh it'll actually basically use the mesh the character to create a new control and allows you to basically hide all the controls and instead of clicking on those normal controls you can click directly on the body that you want to move and then move it the nice thing is it's it's really intuitive you just click what you want to move and move it the downside is that there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes that make it run really slow from my computer so slow it's not worth doing but it's a really cool idea fun to play with and of course easy to leave if it doesn't work the partial joints you can basically you can add an additional joints for where you want to get more control over your mesh so here we added another bone in here to get a better elbow or add another bone for the shoulder or for the chest for the stomach this just gives you more control to tweak out the skeleton make the mesh move the way you want it to same thing I believe with the joint groups I haven't really used those either so again I'm using this just to pump out skeletons rigs as fast as I can so I'm not worried about noodling it but the great thing is that you can if you want to if you do want to create the low poly those are gonna three options for a skeleton which is actually a skeleton I'm I find it to be less useful even though it's super cool looking the poly boxes are probably the most if you create it so I'll go ahead and create one it'll take a minute but it'll throw in poly boxes for the whole character basically trying to guess your volumes if I'm not mistaken you can go ahead and scale these things and make them actually you know approximate the the size of your character so you can actually get this to feel more like your mesh I'm not sure how much you can move them I haven't done a lot of this but the idea is once you create it and mirror it over I guess I should read it before I talk about on tutorial I'm there's a way to basically attach it to your skeleton and then use it as a low poly break for me it's so low poly it's really it's not that useful unless you just need things to run at full frame rates so I'm just gonna go ahead and get delete but it's a way to get a fake mannequin in there our low poly mannequin in there you can also do this here create the mannequin which actually creates a traditional mannequin but again not so useful for as far as I'm concerned but a nice idea it might be better this case in this case for you to make your own low poly one and attach it yourself but these are other options for you to work with so at this point I am nearing the finish of my body rig I'm feeling pretty good about where everything's placed I like my control setup now the one thing just to show you how to move controls you don't like so if example my head and my clavicle clavicle can controls actually maybe I'll start with the head control so it doesn't really matter but here to do the head control I grab my TV's right here I'm sorry what you want to make sure you do is select the control vertices of your curves they have control vertices not vertices but that's because they're made out of NURBS nor curves grab your control vertices you can do whatever you want with this what you don't want to do is you don't want to grab the actual control itself and try to scale it or translate it obviously you'll be moving the joints it's attached to so but if you grab the control vertices that make it up you can do whatever you want so here I typically like my control to be out and back of the head so you know use my grid to rotate this where I want so somewhere out back in here you can also scale not you can do whatever you want whatever you want with those points that you that feels correct to you the nice thing is no matter what you do it doesn't change the rotation point it doesn't change how it functions that just changed where it sits so that's a cool thing so the clavicles you know kind of got got a little messy in there so to fix those up what I'm gonna do is just slide them over and I'll show you how to mirror them over one thing I forgot to mention I did choose show and turned off joints if the joints aren't here when you're trying to select Seavey's it's gonna select the joints first which gets really frustrating so turning the joints off temporarily still when you grab a control and grab those Seavey's it's only grabbing that those Seavey's makes your job a little bit nicer a little bit easier so here it's going to go ahead and kind of square this up a little bit so it looks a little bit nicer I'm gonna pull it out so it's easier to grab and scale it down I'm gonna get it back over the shoulders a little bit so that's a nicer placement of the control as far as I'm concerned make it a little bit fatter I'm not maybe just to save time and then the shoulder of course is right on top of that so I won't get that shoulder control out so I'll slide this out kind of an over over the side of the shoulder to make it easier to see I can scale it down a little bit so it's not so clunking there another nice thing here is advance Skelton gives you the options to mirror i'm the controls the changes he makes you don't think do it all over again so over here some of this control curves yes you can swap in a new curve that you make you can also just hit right to left and it will automatically do any changes from here over to the other side you're good to go so I go through the whole thing and make any changes that I want you do things like change colors stuff like that to which is also nice one thing I should mention you'll notice there's some controls lost in here there's one for the jaw which does a lot of crazy manipulations that's because we didn't tell it what to skin to so that's something you get to paint yourself if you're gonna stop here same thing with the eyes it moves a lot of mesh rent but since we're gonna be doing the the in board facial control system next I'm not going to bother with that it'll replace all of it and do a much better job anyway so to finish up we just need to go through here and we're gonna do a few last options just to make sure the thing it's clean and ready to go again as always I'm gonna save a new version out before you do this just in case anything weird happens if I made a mistake somehow I don't want to be stuck and having to go back to the beginning so I'm gonna jump down here to display will go over these tools later under motion system this is the controls so this is something we do not want to hide keep it open but joints and joint axes we don't want anyone to click on so let's get rid of those so they're still in there we just don't want anyone to see them you can also select a joint layer and make options to hear directly and some people like to put it on a separate layer over here but I'm just going to leave like this it's probably the safest and then under optimize I'm going to go through all these options and get rid of stuff that we don't need so delete unused nodes remove unused influences those two go pretty fast prune clusters also goes pretty fast for me delete saved you guys done also fast notices you have to save and reopen for the file for this to take effect reduced file size and gave me an error I'm not too worried about it maybe I should be I'm not too worried about it if I don't have a reduced file size I'm not worried about it this is already pretty tiny lastly we go to the publish section to finish this thing off remember that our mesh is in a separate file from our skeleton from our actual Brig so we want to actually marry these two things together so going through these options set display layers to our so reference mode joins up the head and we already did that we can do it again if we need to go to build pose super important you want to make sure that everything is defaulted around if you were playing with different controls you want to make sure they're all zeroed when you get ready to rig all those it can cause lots of issues and then finally publish so publish will actually save out another version of this rig that actually has everything married together so I'm gonna open up that rig there we go finished to published and you can make this name whatever you want open up that one instead so this is I'm not a fully functioning ready to go rig well we can do anything you want with this at this point including if you want to do things like you want to go back here you can make changes to you could group these things together I like to put them all under one node tuna so that my outliner is a little bit cleaner if you want you could also do things like a really common trick is to make a layer for your controls so that they're easy to hide hide for your animators a quick way to do that actually is to go to the show menu choose none bring back your NURBS curves select them directly and then create a layer from selected and I'll call this control layer you can't put any spaces in a shelf name are in a layer name so control layer controls whatever you want I'll bring everything back and now I can actually hide my control layer when I'm doing a play a blast I what I just don't want to see it and I can hide my mesh when I want to hide the mesh most is just so you can reference the mesh and make sure you don't accidentally select on it so it makes it easier to animate so at this point I could say this out is my publish to whatever I want to do I could add in anything I want from here that I'm comfortable doing is a rigger or as a modeler animator but the main thing is I have that default reg ready to go this could now be animated on and we have a fully functioning rig now I I spent a good hour hour and a half talking through that but if you were doing this to yourself without me talking in your ear you can easily have a fully functioning body rig in less than half an hour probably 20 20 15 20 minutes if you're if you know exactly what you're doing now the next segment we're going to do is going to be the facial rig and I'll walk you through how to do the whole facial setup which is optional you'll have to do it but if you do do it you wouldn't want to do that from the published version you'd want to do it back here from one of the finished versions that we did before we published so other than that we've finished right you can now reference this into a new scene and start working good luck to all of you I look forward to seeing what rigs you come up with

Channel: Joshua Jones

Views: 129,213

Keywords: advanced, skeleton, rigging, maya, animation, depaul, josh, jones, workshop, tutorial, how, to, joshua, auto, rigger, autorigger

Id: NRsfy1-0jqE

Length: 94min 59sec (5699 seconds)

Published: Sun Jan 21 2018