Basic Character Rigging in 3DS Max

hi Dave Scotland for 3D artist and welcome to another tutorial today we're going to take a look at some rigging and specifically we're going to have a look at some very basic rigging and we're going to rig this character without any bones or without any ik so it's basically a forward kinematic or FK system and that'll become apparent as we move forward in this process I've specifically designed this character to go with this very basic rigging process so please forgive the lack of detail but I think he's uh he's going to really suit the job and it's great for a beginner or someone starting out to have a look at how rigging can be very simple and it does not need to be extremely complexed in a future publication of 3D artist I'm going to be taking this same character with the rig and I'm going to show you how to do a very basic 3D walk cycle so let's get started the first thing you should always do in any 3D process or in any creative process is to check your resources and make sure you thoroughly understand what you've got to work with so just to maximize the screen real estate here I'm going to work in full screen mode here and we got a very simple character and you will notice straight away what I've actually done is modeled this character with rigging in mind and that just basically means that take for instance you've got this joint here is a cylinder because this particular joint your knee joint only rotates on the one axis whereas you've got the hip joint which is a more of a ball joint so I've actually modeled a ball into the actual model and I've tried to maintain that throughout the whole model to make this process a lot easier to both follow and understand so that's why a lot of the decisions were made when when modeling this particular character so with any rigging process the first thing you need to do is really prepare your assets and make sure everything's in place before you start rigging so let's have a look at what we've got here just going to a WI frame for a second and you'll see that I have gone ahead and grouped all of the assets that are specific to certain parts of the anatomy so all of these objects that make up this upper arm including this piston array and the board socket for the shoulder and these these sections here have all been turned into a single editable poly so I'd already done my uvw mapping and materials and textures and things like that and then I was able to turn these into one single editable poly but if you don't want to do that basically you could turn all of these into a group using the group up the top and that way they stay as separate editable Poes but the goal here is to keep all of the anatomy separate so that you have the ability to isolate just certain sections and and get them to move independently with all its subsections moving with it so I've got my forearm there you can see here I've got a a hand I've already got some linking and I'll explain that shortly on the fingers and upper torso and I've also got a lower torso and the lower torso comes down to a large sphere that goes inside the pelvis there as you can see there and then I've got this pelvis outer shell which is going to serve as our pelvis or hip rotation sort of area I've got upper legs lower legs and then down on the feet you can see that I've actually connected everything including the ball socket for the foot and then I've got this section at the front to use as some toe rotation for when we want to do some animation and then I've got the head up here and I've also got a neck object as well and the neck object is going to make it a lot easier to position the head by the animator now this red box at the top is basically for switching mesh smooth on and off for the whole object or the whole robot so if you switch that off basically the whole mesh has an instan mesh smooth you'll notice that everything has this mesh smooth and it's all controlled by this red box up here which is basically your mesh smooth controls also note that in the in the layer manager which we can access up here we under manage layers I've broken uh some layers out I've got a mesh all and I've named everything and you'll notice that I've named them quite thoroughly with left and right naming and I've put an m in front of it basically short for uh mesh and that way at a glance I'll know whether an object is a mesh object or a rig object rig object objects I'll put an r in front of them so it's looking pretty good we're probably okay to move forward and to start to rig the character everything is set up the way we need it and we've grouped everything into their relative anatomical subobjects so the first thing we like to do is to start creating dummy objects and the reason why we use dummy objects instead of rigging the mesh itself is by creating dummy objects I'm then able to go back and manipulate the mesh mesh and change the mesh and it's not going to impact on the rig at all so nine times out of 10 you will use a set of dummy objects and spline objects to rig your characters without touching the mesh we simply just link the mesh uh to the dummy objects but in this instance I'm actually going to use a combination I'm going to use some dummy objects I'm going to use some controllers and I'm also going to use some of the mesh objects especially for the fingers just to make life a little bit easier and to show you that you can actually use mesh objects uh to rig your character the actual mesh themselves so the first thing I like to do is work in a top view and the reason I work in a top view is when you create something in the top view it inherit the world space of 3D Studio Max and uh if you don't understand that I'm not going to go into it in too much detail but it has to do with Native pivot Points of an object and it's affected by which which viewport you actually create the object in so so the top view is going to inherit the world space of 3ish Studio Max and that just makes life a bit easier if we come over to our creation Tab and then go into our helpers I'm going to create a dummy just going to swap to wireframe mode and what I'm going to do is create a series of dummies just going to create one for the shoulder create one for the elbow and one for the wrist and I'm not too concerned with how they line up at the moment moment I'm going to position these shortly now you'll notice if I come to a front view that they're down on the ground just select all three of them and roughly move them up and that's looking pretty good and we'll just leave them there for now we're going to fine tune those shortly I'm also going to create a dummy for the hips the knees and the feet I'm going to do that in the top view as well so I might just create them down here just go to a front view now and just roughly bring them up and line them up that's looking pretty good I think that one there could be a bit little bit bigger it just makes it a little easier to grab your dummies in the viewport if they're outside of the mesh so that's working pretty well let go to a left view now and get those to be in line with their relative joints okay that's looking pretty good now what I'm going to do is line up these dummy objects as best I can with the actual pivot Points of the geometry now it's very important that we get these pivot Points right if if they're not in the right place then they absolutely will not rotate correctly and the rig just won't work so it's really important that we get this right what I'm going to do is click on the dummy and I know that this this ball joint is correctly positioned so all I have to do is line it up with the center of the ball so I'm zooming right in and this is I'm in a front view now and you you do have to be quite detailed that's looking pretty good and now I'm just going to this is in a front view notice up here so now I'm just going to go to a left view which is a hot key L and I'm going to do the same thing and zoom right in there and make sure it's lined up in the front to back access as well and once you have done this in the front and left view then it should be perfectly lined up you won't need to use the top view because we're doing the back to front lineup in the left View and while we're here we'll jump into the knee same again now if you've ever used Max before you may be wondering why I'm not using the Align tool when I create turn these objects into an editable poly if you highlight this leg for instance have a look where the Gizmo is and that is the pivot point of the leg so unfortunately the pivot point of each object is not in the middle of the joint so this is really the only way that we can do this operation so what I'm trying to do here is and it's a little easier to line this up in in the front view first and once again I know that this little cross here is exactly where the dummy needs to be and as I said before you must be accurate at this point otherwise you will never be able to animate the character correctly it will move in a very bizarre manner so that's our dummies for our ankle knee and hips and what I'm going to show you now in fact I'm just going to pause the video I'm going to go ahead and create the rest of all line up the rest of the dummies and then I'm going to show you how we get these working on the other side here okay so I've got my dummies lined up perfectly with my anatomy now and what I want to do is do the other side as well or bring these dummies on both sides of the character so I'm going to grab all of the arm dummies and then I'm going to use the mirror key now I'm going to make sure that I'm in View mode and I'm in a perfect front view and then I'm just going to click on mirror and what we want to do is make sure X is fine for the axes but we want to make sure copy is ticked and also make sure the I limits is actually ticked as well just go okay and then drag these across what we're trying to do is line these up if I swap now to local mode just go to Pivot Point Center you'll notice that only one pivot point is visible here but if I go up into my customize preferences and just go to gizmos I can tick allow multiple gizmos and that allows me to actually line up my gizmos now we don't need to move it up and down we just need to line it up in the center which is this one right here we can check that with the hand as well slide in there and you can see that it's right on the money all good so now I use the same method for the legs down here grab all three use my mirror it's remembered the copy you can also use the offset here the problem here is that you sort of need to know the distance that these objects are off the center line in order to put a hard and fast figure in there but you can roughly line it up just go okay and then just move in here I found that the sphere down the bottom is pretty easy to to line it up and same again we don't need to move up and down or backwards and forwards we just need to move it in and out that looks good okay so now I have my dummy objects on my arms and on my legs I just need to do some controllers now now these aren't dummy objects these are actually splines so I'm just going to go into my spline menu here and the first one I'm going to create is a circle just going to go to a top view and just going to roughly draw a circle in the viewport doesn't matter too much about the size because we can change the radius just going to go to a front view now and I'm going to move it up and in fact what I'm going to do is just make sure in a view rotation mode I'm going to make sure that I right click on all of these spinner values down the bottom and what that does is resets the circle I've just drawn to the world center which is down the bottom here because this robot has actually been created at that World Center that means that it's perfectly aligned with these with the robot now what I'm going to do is slide it up and put it just above the robot's head just like this and then I'm going to just go into my modify tab for the circle I'm going to tick enable in viewport which makes it an actual thick spline with actual polygons instead of just a line makes it a lot easier to see in the viewport but you'll notice here that enabling renderer is going to remain unticked I'll give it a thickness of one should be fine and I'm going to bring the radius out a little bit and then I'm just going to line it up with the head just go to a left view so I can see that in the viewport remember this is just a control object that allows me to click on it to select it to rotate the head later on I'm going to be moving the the pivot point of this down to the correct Pivot Point location which is down somewhere in the neck here much the same as your head is now that's my head object and what I'm going to do is just name it rore head uh meaning rig and now what I'm going to do is just go to a front view and I'm going to grab that in fact I might just change the color to make it a little easier to see I'm going to grab that and hold shift and drag down and what I want to do is roughly put it down where the uh pelvis is and that looks pretty good and I'm going to use the Align tool this time I'm going to click and align and I'm going to line align to this lower you can see this large sphere that's inside here I'm going to click and align that uh I was very careful to maintain the axis point of that sphere because it's so crucial to get the pelvis area aligned very accurately then uh it was important to make sure that I knew exactly where that would be so what this one's going to be is a hip Rotator so I'll just go hip Rotator on that one and then what I'm going to do is in the top view just going to use and to create a re rectangle just going to go to a top view and this one is going to be fairly big go to a front view I'm also going to I'm just going to bring that up but I'm also going to align that using the Align tool to that same sphere object which is by the way this mid Rift section is linked to that as well so if I click on that it and what happens is it it snaps to the exact same position as the previous ring and that means it's perfectly aligned but now I'm just going to slightly bring it down just so that it's easier to grab in a front viewport in fact I might just bring the hips up a little higher probably about there and then I'll bring the torso up and I'll to be to be sure I'll align it perfectly to that and you can see there that what I'm left with is a large square and change the color of that to a red as well and then I've got a small circle and that's for the hip alignment there so I've got my two controllers this large square is going to be my center of gravity so Cog it's a term that you use a lot in animation every character has a center of gravity controller and basically every part of the character comes back to this center of gravity controller and then usually it's connected to a a large character controller on the ground which we we might as well create that right now I'm just going to grab that hip Rotator I'm going to shift and drag it down and as a copy and this one's going to be R let's call it the master master character and go okay and just move to a left view have it so that it just rests perfectly on the bottom like that then I'm just going to play with the radius bring the radius up quite large something like that I'll probably bring it down slightly that that looks pretty good then I'm just going to go into a left View and this is quite important to understand we need to go into the hierarchy Tab and then I'm going to go effect pivot only and this allows me to actually move the pivot point of that object without moving the object this is very important for rigging and what I'm going to do is move that Pivot Point to the base of the circle instead of in the center of the circle and remember I'm in a left view here what that means is that if I've got a ground plane I just have to sit this circle on the ground plane and not below it and then the character will actually be able to walk on that ground plane with actually without going through the ground plane so that's how we affect the pivot without affecting the actual object itself so we're looking pretty good the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into a left view here and I'm going to create another Circle probably something about that big should do us then I'm going to move it over and in fact I should be able to align it to this toe object here mainly because I know that I positioned the pivot point of this toe geometry object right in the center of this cylinder here so what this is going to be is with our foot controls that we can just grab this and we can rotate the toes and it might need to go a little bit bigger just so that it's a bit easier to grab and that looks pretty good and we'll make that our standard red color we'll go to a top view and rotate around slightly just so that I can shift and rotate over just as a copy go okay and then I'm going to align that to the to this toe so now I've got two toe controllers I've got my ankle controls I've got my knees hips I've got my uh hip rotators this is my pelvis control and now I just need some uh torso controls or spine controls and a neck control so I'm going to take this circle again it's been quite handy for us and I'm going to shift and drag it up I'm going to put it about going to put it about there and this one's going to be called Lower torso and then I'm going to do shift and drag up again just put it slightly under the arms of the character and this one's going to be called upper torso and I just need to bring the radius of that out so that it's easily grabbed in the viewport that's looking pretty good so just going to make sure that this one's aligned correctly and it is due to the fact that we aligned this one correctly and it's looking pretty good yep last thing to uh include is the net controls so I'm just going to go to a top view and create another dummy in the helpers that's going to do it just go to a left and move it up just go into a wireframe if you zoom in you can see that there is like a cylinder you can see in here there's a cylinder not to be confused with the uh piston that's on its upper arm there's this single line that goes around here now that cylinder is meant to represent the cylinder that the neck rotates on so I'm going to make sure that I'm in line with that which is around about here it looks pretty good and then I'm going to go to a front view and try to line this up with the center of that cylinder and I know that that's it there it's actually if I bring up my G for grid you'll see that it's right on the center black line here in fact I could right click on the x-axis to make sure that it's perfectly on the x-axis and that's working very nicely so there's my neck controller so I could easily rename that rore neck so I now have all of my controllers and dummies created and you might think well we haven't done anything for the hands well the reason for that we have done the hands we've T we've taken care of the hands with the wrist Rotator here but it's the fingers now if I just go to a top view what I've actually done is I've gone ahead I made sure that I maintained the axis for the individual fingers so you can see if I just go into a local mode you'll be able to see the actual rotation of these fingers and each finger joint includes the ball joint that it's connected to there's another one there's one and the hand actually includes all the board joints for the base Knuckles now when we start to link these up this will become a lot more apparent but basically what we're going to do is we're not using dummies or controllers for the fingers we're actually going to use the geometry itself and we're going to link the actual raw geometry and all of the pivot Points have already been taken care of but if this was your character you would have to go through and make sure by using the hierarchy effect pivoton button and you would reposition the pivot Points for each of the joints so that they represented the knuckle positions for each finger so we're looking pretty good it's time now to start linking the character together which is really when the rig starts to come together okay so here's our character and you'll notice there's one or two changes from where we left off I've added some knee controllers they're just circles added exactly the same way as the feet now it's important to note that I have actually changed some Pivot Point locations for some of these controllers in the center when we created the center of gravity and the hip rotators we align them to this sphere that's in the center of our character here and that is the lower torso sphere and if I rotate it you'll see that it rot grab the correct object in fact I just need to go into my layer manager and just unfreeze my mesh so I can see what I'm doing if I rotate that that sphere it's joined to the Torso and this here is the Torso controls the lower torso controls now notice where the pivot point is for this torso control here what I actually did is went into my hierarchy tab selected effect pivot only just jump into a front view here and I dragged the Pivot Point down and lined it up in a Wii frame mode I just lined it up with the center of this sphere that's inside the pelvis here and that means that when I connect this pelvis object this lower torso object to this controller here it will rotate from the correct position you'll notice that I select this if I was to rotate it it's going to rotate from down here and not up in the center of the circle I did the same with the upper torso as well you'll notice that the upper torso controls have a pivot point that is roughly just above or sorry just below this opening in the chest cavity here and that's the point where I can get the best uh amount of rotation without the geometry cutting into itself so there's been a bit of thought that's gone into that it is important to make sure that those pivot Points are in the right place same too with the head if you select the head you'll see now that the head if we go to a left view the head rotation point is actually nicely positioned at the base of the head right where the neck and the head meet and there's this ball object here and that's actually going to be the rotation point for the head so the head controller and then all we do is link the head geometry to the controller so that's what we're going to do now just go to a top view and I'm going to start out with the fingers and the way this basically works if I was to grab the this hand joint this uh wrist joint and move it nothing is connected to it if I grab the hand nothing is connected to it so the first thing we need to do is is is link any geometry to its corresponding controller and as I've mentioned we're not going to be touching any geometry in the animation process the only geometry we're going to be touching are the fingers so grab your link tool which is this is your selected link tool and I'm going to grab the hand click drag to the dummy and you'll see now that when I select the dummy and move it the hand goes with it if I rotate the dummy the hand goes with it and that's exactly what I need later on we're going to freeze this hand so the animator can't touch it I'm going to grab the lower arm click and drag to the elbow joint I'm going to take the upper arm I'm going to click and drag to the shoulder joint and you'll see now that if I was to grab that shoulder the upper arm moves with it grab the elbow the lower arm moves with it but the wrist gets left behind so now what we do is we take the wrist and Link it to the elbow and we take the elbow and Link it to the shoulder so now if I grab my shoulder we'll ignore the fingers for now and rotate the shoulder the whole arm goes with it if for rotate the elbow just the lower arm and if I rotate the wrist it's just the hand which is exactly what we're looking for now with the fingers what we do is we link from the tip back to the base and the tip is the child of the next one the middle knuckle is the child of the next one or the bass knuckle and then the bass is the child of the dummy not the hand don't link the base Knuckles to the hand cuz remember we're going to be freezing that hand later on we'll just do the thumb and the base to the dummy so now if we grab the dummy and rotate it the whole hand and the fingers go with it and if I doubleclick on any one of these base joints double click and change to loc mode and then make sure I'm in Pivot Point basically what I can do is curl the fingers in a natural organic curl and it looks like this one's been left behind if I select this and rotate it it's on its own so let's go ahead and grab this link it to that one grab that one link it to this one and then we should be able to double click and curl the fingers so we can see what we're doing there you go do the next one double click just to test it we're going to test this out thoroughly later on but just to show you that it was working okay it's all good and then when I select the hand everything moves with it I select the elbow everything's moving the way it should be so I'm going to grab the upper torso and I'm going to click and Link it to the Torso controller which is this ring here so now when I rotate that the AR torso rotates with it I'm also going to grab the shoulder and I'm going to link that to that torso ring as well the upper torso ring because we want the shoulder to always stay with the Torso then I'm going to grab the upper torso ring and I'm going to link it to the lower torso ring I'm also going to take the lower torso geometry and Link that to that same lower torso ring so now that now when I rotate that lower torso the upper torso goes with it and so does the geometry I'm going to take that lower torso ring and I'm going to link it to the center of gravity which is the big Square then I'm going to take the pelvis geometry and Link it to the hip rotators which is this circle here and then I'm going to take the hip Rotator and Link it to the center of gravity as well and that just means that when I move the center of gravity everything goes with it we haven't done the legs yet but then I can also independently rotate the hips without changing the Torso I can now take I'll just go to a front view zoom in a little bit and I'm going to link the upper the upper leg to the dummy so that when I rotate the dummy I get the upper leg and I'm going to take the dummy and I'm going to link it to the hip Rotator which is this circle here so we just make sure that that's gone through and it has I'm going to take my lower leg geometry and Link it to the red controller that we created and then I'm going to take the red controller and Link that to our dummy basically what that means is we can rotate from the hips and then I can rotate from the knees as well I'm going to take my foot geometry and Link it to my ankle and then take my ankle and Link it to the red controller and then when I rotate the red controller the foot goes with it and now I have independent foot rotation as well I'm going to take the toe geometry and I'm going to link it to the red ring controller then I'm going to take the red ring controller and Link it to the dummy in the ankle so now if I rotate the foot toes go with it but I also have independent rotation on the toes as well and the last thing I want to do now I've only done one side of the body but um you're going to be able to replicate what I've done on the left hand side of the character to the right hand side I'm just going to grab the center of gravity and I'm going to link that to the master controller and that way when I move the master controller everything moves with it but I also have independent center of gravity animation as well just going to go to a left view zoom in here a little bit I want the neck controller to be linked to this top torso ring so that the neck controller goes with it but then I need to link the neck geometry which is the one with with the sphere here to the dummy and I want to link the head geometry to the red head controller link the red head controller back to the neck controller dummy which is right here and if you've done that correctly you should be able to rotate the neck controller and the head rotates with it but also have independent head rotation without any neck as well and then if you rotate the Torso the head will go with it so just go to our front view and you can see now that if I grab the center of gravity and move it everything goes except for those leg and arm that we haven't done yet but everything is connected to it I can grab my lower torso and rotate it over grab my upper torso rotate it a little bit more I can rotate my arm up rotate my elbow so you can see that we're starting to get a parenting hierarchy sorted out for our character I'm just going to pause the video jump ahead and complete the other side of the character so that everything is linked correctly so I've finished the other side of the character now and we can rotate anything we want in the character what we need to do now is make sure that we're going to be able to animate this character in The poses that we need to so uh we're going to do some standard bipedal character animation with this guy we're going to do some walks runs those sorts of things so first thing I like to do is make sure the legs are going to work the way I want them and uh I've got good rotation back and forward what is a good method to test a rig is to come out to about 10 frame 10 on your timeline and switch on auto key and the beauty of this is I can actually really put this character in some extreme poses and not have to keep hitting contrl Z to undo those poses so what I'm doing now is just really testing and making sure that this character is going to be able to do what I want in fact because it's a robot and not human with uh with mesh with with skinning we can really get away with some pretty full-on poses and that one's looking pretty good and the reason why I've used the auto key is now all I need to do is Select this key frame here and delete it I can select the knee controller and delete that key frame select the ankle delete that key frame select the toe delete that key frame and I'm back to my starting pose now that is saves a lot of headaches when you want to go back to a starting pose uh without having to restart the file or go contrl Z about 50 times so really test the rig out what I'm going to do now is make sure that the hip controllers work and the way the hip controllers are designed to work is it gives me independent hip control here without changing the torso up the top and then I've got my lower torso rotation here which is looking good my upper torso Lo rotation that's working great I've got my two my shoulders rotate the elbow put this shoulder up a little higher so really put the character through its Paces double click on the base of any finger and make sure you're in local mode and you should be able to rotate organically with all of the fingers curling nicely cool and then if you want to reset it back to normal the easy way is to select all and then just go back to frame zero and delete all of the key frames then you can switch auto key off and you're now back to standard pose so I've tested everything and this is by no means uh the full extent of the testing that I've done I want you to really test the rig and make sure that you haven't left anything behind I just wanted to also show you what I've done in the manage layers my layer managers I've got two groups two layers with all of the finger joints for that left hand or left set of fingers and then I've got the right fingers I've got all of my mesh if I was to select everything in the mesh in fact this is that multiple Gizmo and I'm just going to switch that off by going into my customized preferences now that I don't need it anymore just go allow multiple gizmos to switch that off uh there are all my mesh objects there and then I've got my mesh smooth toggle object which is the square up here and then I've got all my rig objects in the same group now what this means is that I can select all I can take all of my mesh objects and freeze them and that way I can't even accidentally grab any mesh objects I can only animate the animatable objects which are the dummies and the controllers I can easily take my rig objects and hide them if I want do a render I can take my rig objects click select highlighted I can right click go into object properties and make sure that they're not renderable so none of my controllers are actually renderable now only the character itself so if I just pull this into view here only the character will actually render here and none of the controllers will actually render so once again it stay it it pays to be organized especially if you're going to hand this rig over to character animator or somebody else in the pipeline so we've tested the rig and now what we have to do is lock it down we don't want to do any incorrect animation we don't want the animator to break the rig by grabbing things that we don't want them to and we do that by freezing and locking objects now I've already shown you how to freeze the mesh and notice that it's gray in the viewport well that's a bit ugly and we don't want that so what we can do is just go mesh all select right click object properties and just untick show Frozen in Gray and that way we'll get full color in the viewport whilst the object is still frozen so everything that is animatable is now unfrozen and we can't accidentally grab any of the geometry we shouldn't be touching but we can lock it even further than that and a lot of it's got to do with the type of joints that we're dealing with notice here I can a shoulder rotates up and down it rotates forward and backwards and and it even to some degree pivots from the shoulder as well which means it's it's a true ball joint and the elbow is very different to that the elbow should never rotate like this and it should also not rotate like this now you do get a little bit of forearm twist in a human being this is a robot so we don't have to worry about it but in a human character we do get some twist in the forearm and that's a different different process Al together it's still a hinge joint that that happens from the elbow though so what I'm going to do I'm just going to hide this and show you how we're going to lock these joints down the shoulder can stay the way it is however what I want to do is take every controller in the rig and we can do that with our layer manager just select our rig objects and what I want to do is deselect the base controller which is this one here actually we will reselect that so I've got every single controller in the character I'm going to go into my link info button which is in my hierarchy tab so not in the control not in the create tab it's in the hierarchy tab click link info and what you're looking at are the locks and I want to lock the scale for everything that I've got selected there okay so everything is scale locked I can't accidentally scale my character which can be devastating to a rig so now I'm just going to alt and click on the ground and I'm also going to alt and click on the center of gravity and I'm going to tick all of the move locks and the reason for that is everything is rotation uh apart from those to so now I'm just going to click a couple of specific ones I'm going to click the center of gravity and it needs to have its rotation locked it's very important that we don't rotate the center of gravity unless we have absolutely need to and I don't want to accidentally do it so I'm going to tick it off but it is also important that we do have full range of movement on the center of gravity now the hip rotators which is this one here it's fine it can rotate forward backwards left right and a little bit of twist as well so we're going to leave that as is same to with the two spines they're fine to rotate in every axxis we'll come down to the knees the knees only need to rotate on the Zed axis do the same for the other one keep coming down we keep full rotation for the ankles but these toe rotators also Z axis only lock those up the hips are fine they need full rotation shoulders full rotation elbows just the Zed so now it can only rotate the way it's supposed to and for the wrists full rotation now with the fingers what we do is all of the base joints which are these four and the thumb base joint we want to switch off the moves and the scales in fact we might as well grab everything in the hand and make sure scale is Tick for everything and move his tick for everything but for the base of each joint lock X only that means it can rotate take for instance this one here I can rotate this way a little bit if I want to splay the fingers spread the fingers apart and it will also rotate this way so it's just the base fingers that do that we don't want these fingers to rotate left and right so we want to make sure that we grab all of these and it looks like I've already done it in a previous save I'm going to grab all of these and these as well and make sure X and Zed is locked in this instance and Y is unlocked and that that means that they will bend in the direction they're supposed to looks like the thumb is a little bit out of whack but we can still work around that's why the Gizmo is good in the viewport so for this one here it looks like it should be the Zed and for this one also it should be the Zed that's left unlocked and that way you can rotate in the direction it's designed to rotate in the thumb is very unique make sure it has full rotation in all axes so the elbow's looking pretty good shoulders are all looking good the neck controller what I want with the net controller I want it to be able to move back and forward and left and right but I don't want it to rotate like this so I'm going to take the Zed rotation out of it and the head I do want to rotate in all directions and we're looking pretty good okay so there's our character now and he's ready to go he's ready to be animated we've tested the rig completely all we need to do now is hand it over to the animator or start animating we've taken all of our joints we've constrained them by locking any of the axes that don't need to be animated they've all been hierarchically linked together correctly we've Frozen anything that doesn't need to be touched and we've created a nice controller system that is going to allow us to pretty much create any animation we need for a simple robotic bipedal character so that's going to do us for this tutorial I really hope you grab the robot file and uh work your way through it and in prepar to of our next tutorial which is going to be a simple walk cycle hopefully you'll be able to complete that walk cycle using your own rig and that way from start to finish it's all going to be your own work and I know you're going to get a lot of enjoyment and learn a lot out of this process so give it a go I hope you enjoy it my name's Dave Scotland

Channel: CG Swot

Views: 100,469

Keywords: CG Swot, CGSwot.com, Dave Scotland, Tutorial, rigging, character, 3ds max, no bones

Id: 0PogyaBTmeE

Length: 48min 15sec (2895 seconds)

Published: Sat Jan 24 2015