- Hey, today I want to show you how to use my favorite character
rigging tool for Maya. It's called Advanced Skeleton. Now I'm not a rigger at all, but it's allowed me to rig a range of characters and creatures, and used in many of my studio productions. Check it out. (upbeat music) Amazingly, it's free. I mean, you can pay for a
freelancer license to get support, but the free version is fully functional and no, I'm not affiliated
with it in any way. I just think it's great. It's been really good for us. So I've put together five videos to walk through the process step by step. If you like them, please subscribe. That way, when I add more free tutorials, you'll get notified. All right, let's get started. The first step is to obviously
install Advanced Skeleton. We need to nip over to this URL which is
animationstudios.com.au/advanced-skeleton-download, download the latest version. If you download it to your
C drive, it works best 'cause you need it on a
mapped drive or a C drive because you can get errors if it's not, if it's on a network drive or a NAS drive that doesn't actually have
a specific drive letter. Once you have downloaded
and installed everything, it's very easy to install. You just simply, you will unzip it, you'll get a install.mel file, you'll create a new shelf, so up in your Maya, go to Maya, New Shelf, call it whatever you want. I've called mine AS2,
or Advanced Skeleton, whatever you want to call it. And you simply just drag
and drop the install into a clean viewport, and
it'll install it for you. It's very simple, it's all done for you. So that makes it very easy for you. Okay, so here is the model
we're going to be working on. This is one of my designs
from another project. What we want to do is we
need to prep this model to work with Advanced Skeleton. There's a lot of tools. So up here in your shelf, if
you hit the little five button, it'll always open the
Advanced Skeleton main UI, the main GUI, and we need
to clean the model up first, make sure it's symmetrical because if it's not exactly symmetrical, you will get problems and errors when you come to rig the face later. That's the main area of concern, so that's what we've got to do. So as you can see, this
little girl was ready to go. What we're going to do
is run Advanced Skeleton and use the Model Check to
check she's symmetrical. Now, typically, a lot of
you probably just do a flip on the X scale to check it's symmetrical. This is the original way of doing things. If I just go into a
front view, hide my grid, go into textured mode, and I will turn off my grid, I'll go into textured
mode, which is shading. I'll turn off the Use Default tool, which I accidentally had on then. I'll take off the wireframe as well. So let me just hide
everything but the body, just so we can see what we're going to do. I'm just going to hide
the dress and the buttons. I'm going to put the
T-shirt on a new layer just for now, just so
we can find a way around the model easy. I'm going to just hide that. Okay, so I'm going to
go into wireframe mode. And this is the classic way
of checking for symmetry. We would normally, Hi-Res Body, we would normally duplicate it, so it's got a copy exactly
over the top at the moment. Go to Scale X, minus one. And as you see nothing changed. It's exactly on the top,
even though it's flipped. So this does look like
it's exactly symmetrical, but you'll be surprised after running it through Advanced Skeleton
set up cleanup tool, that it might find some vertices that aren't quite symmetrical which can really throw your rig of later, so you must get this
right from the beginning. So if I just delete the duplicate and we'll go back to shaded view and I'll just show you what I mean here. So what we do is we select the body, specifically, this is an all in one piece. You might ever separate facial mesh. A lot of characters are like this with the clothes on the top. It really depends on your setup. And we're going to go
over to Advanced Skeleton. First, we're going to do a model check. So we hit Model Check, check for symmetry, select the model, then click check. You notice straight away it
says we're off pivot point. It doesn't matter for this, but I'm going to show you
what it's referring to. I'm going to go back
to a perspective window and what you'll notice is
if I press W and then move, it's expecting the pivot
point to be naught, naught, exactly on the grid. You can fix this now if you want, but it's going to fix it for you later, but I'll show you how to do that anyway. You select the model,
click the insert key, then we will go down right to the grid, we will press the X key and just right, just sorry, just middle mouse
button hover and then click, and it will pop it there. Click the insert again, and
you've moved the pivot point. As you can see over here, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero, zero. And she's exactly on the pivot point. So let's go back and do another check. So as you noticed
before, we did the flip X and it looked exactly symmetrical. We're going to do a check. And what it's doing as
you can see down here it's running through 37%,
39, 40%, checking symmetry. The more dense your model,
the longer this will take. And here it's found something, you see? "Selected vertices are not symmetrical. Continue Anyway." I'm going to click continue,
and you can see it's found a couple of vertices on each
side, which aren't symmetrical. Now you might have some under the armpit, on the face, wherever it will be, but we've got to fix
these before we move on. So the way to do that is I will
go into my front view again. I will select all these vertices here. And we know we've got the few
vertices we wanted in there. I'm going to go up to
the modeling tool set. I'm going to go to Edit Mesh, Symmetrize, symmetry, and it's going
to ask me for a selective exactly in the center, an edge. Just click once and it's fixed it. You won't have noticed anything, but it would have moved
the selected vertex into the select position
on the other side. So now if we select off, I'm
going to select the model, I'm going to click Check again. It's going to run through
the process again. Here it goes. 50%, again, the denser your model, the longer this will take. And we have the successful
message come up. "Model is symmetrical." So this now is good to rig. It's good for specifically
the facial setup. So now we can carry on with
the Model Clean set up. So I'm going to unhide the
clothes again and everything. I'm going to go back
to my perspective view. So the model is ready to go. So what we need to do now is, all the pivot points might
be in separate places. As you can see, the pivot
point for that is down here, the buttons, the eyelashes, everything, everything has to be naught, naught. You could go through and do that yourself, but there's also other
things that will pick it up. So if I click, that there's
all sorts of helper tools that come up in Advanced Skeleton. If I click on the question mark, it's come up on my other monitor. I'll just move over for you. Model Cleaner, so it is really good, helpful to read these things. It says, "This tool works by
exporting each polygon object to an .obj format, then
creating a new scene, and importing the .obj files. Since the .obj format supports limited object
attributes and information, data will be removed. This reduces model file size and will improve rig deformation. So basically, all it
does is the Model Clean, it exports the whole lot as an .obj and back in again, which strips or the, anything that's rough or
might upset the system. It just brings in a clean rig. So we're going to go through that. We can close this, and again, you know, click these little
helper files for anything and that will be there to
guide you along the way. Okay, so to use the Model Clean, what it's going to do is
you need to put things into a group called geo
for the scripting to work. You can see I've got everything down here. Now, my eyes have got
procedure stuff on them. They've got some
configuration of all files where I can change the size
of the iris and everything. So we're not going to select those and we're going to add them
back into the rig later. Yours might just be a simple sphere and you can keep them in. So I'm going to close that. What we need to do is just get everything into a group called geo. So I've got a group called Isabella here. And let me just check. So we've got the Hair
group, the Hi-Res Body, we've got the trainers. Everything's in there all ready to go. So I could effectively
just group this node, call it geo, g-e-o,
lowercase, nothing else. Hit Enter, we now have a new group node with everything underneath it. There's all my geometry without the eyes. I don't want my eyes, and
I don't want my lights, I've got some V-Ray dome lights in here, other light groups, which
obviously we don't need. And then what we're going to do, do you don't even need
to select the model now 'cause the script looks for
this parent group called geo. So we're going to do a, I'm going to click the Model Clean button and you'll see it go through the process. Model Clean. It says, "Have you created a
top level group called geo?" If you create this, it'll
create them for you, but we've already done that. Now you're ready for clean. So we'll click the Clean button. And it says, "More than one
object matches the name geo." Now Advanced Skeleton is
very fussy with the names. So you need to make sure that all, anything in a group has got, has actually got
underscore group after it. It could be group, it could
be g-r-o-u-p, or g-r-p. And we can't have duplicate
names of anything. So I want to keep all
these errors in there 'cause this might be things
you might come up with that we need to fix. So I'm going to delete the Shader Assign. I'm going to go through
and see what we've got here that we've got to duplicate group called geo in there somewhere. Let's do a little search. And there it is. There it is. So I'm going to delete
this empty group node. Oops, sorry, I'm going to undo that. And let's just find out where that is. That's in here, and we've got
an old group node left over. See, this is the good thing
about keeping your model clean. At the moment, I've
just been modeling away, I've got loads of groups, so we definitely need to clean this up, but for now, let's just get this working. So let's select the geo group. Go Edit, Ungroup, and now we've got two
groups called Isabella, which we don't want, and
two groups called Head_Grp. Oh, actually, I think this was from before when we duplicated the model. So let's just delete this. Yes, so there you go. So that's what's good about
keeping your model clean. And I want to keep, and this is the way I'm
going to work, guys, is I'm going to keep all errors in there because you see a lot of tutorials that they'll do it and
everything just works fine. I don't want everything to work fine. I want to come across errors, I want to find things that go wrong, because you will come
across things that go wrong. So this is great, we're cleaning
up live in front of you, and working through these problems. So let's just have another check. We've got a model, we've got a geo group, we've got a clothes group. Let's try this again. Let's click Clean. And there we go. It's running through the process. You can always see how it's
going along the bottom. You'll get the success
or the error messages. And there we go, we're done. So what it's done is it's
done exactly what we've said. It's exported out what we need and imported
it back in as an .obj. Let me zoom in here. And I didn't select my
eyes, so they've gone. What you'll notice now is that, let me just click shaded view 'cause the shadings all are there, it just brings it back
in, in unshaded view. And what we've got is
everything's been cleaned. So everything's pivot
point is set to there, even the eyelashes. There's no history on anything. If you look over here in my history, it's literally just single nodes. It stripped out all the data. It stripped out everything
that we don't need, which is great. So I'm going to delete
any lights in the scene. My light group, eyes group. And I'm going to do a, just in case, just for extra safety, I'm going to do a Delete
All by Type, History. And I'm also going to do, just because I'm paranoid, I do a File, we want to do a Optimized Scene Size. This isn't necessary, but I like to do it. What it does, it removes any
empty layers, removes sets. The cleanup tool would
have done that anyway, but because I had the
V-Ray lights in there it's nothing wrong with being
doubled, triple, extra clean. So now we've got this finished
clean model ready to go and be rigged with Advanced Skeleton. So what I like to do is, I mean, everyone's got
their own naming convention. I like to now save this
as File, Save Scene As, I like to call it the name of
the character, model, cleaned. And you can save that as an .ma or a .mb, whatever you like. Just 'cause I know that it's
been cleaned and it's purely, so you've still got your original model that you want to go back to, so this has just saved as ready to rig. So I'm going to click Save As. And I just want to show
you guys one more thing. Sometimes, if you've got a normal map on some of your materials, I can't remember if I have it here or not. It might actually, when you do
the model clean, it has this, Advanced Skeleton has this habit, I'll just open up the, just a little, extra bonus tip. When you see it clean
and it brings it back in, you might see some of
your textures messed up. They're not actually messed up. If you've got any normal maps, here's one, it seems to be all right in mine. Yeah, you can see it here. It's actually changed it to sRGB. You don't want that. No normal map should be on sRGB. It should be on Raw, okay? So I've changed that back again and that will now work properly. So just a little bonus tip there. And I think that's everything ready to go. So thank you for video
one, prepping the model. I will see you in video
two for joint placement and setting up the Advanced
Skeleton joint system. Thanks very much. (smooth computerized music)
