Joints and Weights in Cinema4D

hey guys demo fleas here I've got a tutorial here that's a bit of a follow up on the crash course in rigging I did previously in that tutorial I showed you how to rig up an undulating tail and on my website there's a file for you guys to download to kind of follow along I'll be using that to build off of so you want to make sure to if you haven't already watched this first video and also download this file so you can kind of follow along here so that previous tutorial had this showed you how to you know rig up this tail and while it moves nicely you'll notice that the arms are noticeably absent or they're just very rigid and they don't have the same kind of characteristics as the tail so that's the whole point of this tutorial is how do we add joints to this rig without destroying what's currently there what's already there and you know I've run into many times where I've gotten a model or an asset where it's partially rigged and you know some portion of the mesh doesn't have anything where I need it and you know I needed to add in that detail add in that all those joints so hopefully that's will be able to cover that and show you how to how to achieve that without breaking what you know exists there currently so let's give this a start the first thing as I'm going through this you'll you'll notice I'm going to be hitting this a lot this PS a reset PS our button if you don't already have it docked in your interface or have a shortcut to sign for it character commands reset PS are and all that does is takes an element and then zeros out the coordinates to zero so rather than going here and typing in zero zero zero you know tap on that button once and it brings it back to zero so I'll be hitting that a lot you want you dock that to kind of follow along but the other thing is that you'll notice that this joint chain you know as we were playing it to kind of simulate and get the you know the dynamics going as we pause this doesn't we'll hit reset PSR but the joint chain itself get back to the defaulted state the zero state and which straight and we we definitely need that as we build this up so in your play head if you rewind I don't get it straight but now as you click and tap somewhere here inside the the object manager you'll notice that it's already updating by itself and we don't want that we want that to only update and only do the you know the dynamic simulation only when we hit play so I think this comes on by default on the I kate AG here we want to go to dynamics and disable continuous update like I said I think that comes in by default so now when you tap on it it doesn't do anything and that's what we want so rewinding will get a straight joint chain and will allow us the defaulted state that we want to build the next step and the next step is going into our front view and what we're gonna do is draw on some new joints so go to character joint tool and if you hold down shift X you'll bring up the snapping tools make sure you've got an eight snap enabled vertex snap enabled and make sure you you've got nothing selected here in the object manager and then here in the viewport we want to go command and click and drag to the edge loop the center edge loop we kind of want to keep these things you know on a point on an edge loop you know you definitely don't want it somewhere out in space here where it doesn't have any influence you want it influenced ideally on a on a point or on an edge loop so that's centered up and if we go to our top view we just need to move this into place so we'll go to the tap on that root and it go into the move tool and because snapping is on all that stuff should just pop into place and when we kick back out to the perspective that joint chain should be in the middle of our mesh which is what we want just for clarity's sake just so we that we can focus in and on the joints that we're going to be working with I'm going to turn off spine the visibility of that spine and work with this arm so if we middle-click close that out it'll click on that joint chain that the top joint and let's rename this left arm and while that's good we get descriptive we don't have um we need to number these and there's a really handy cool trick here it's kind of like a Konami code if you hit the shift C and type in naming tool we want to break out that - well it's also under tools naming tool what we want to have it's great for renaming things so if you wanted to you know replace left with right you can do that here but what you can also do is add a suffix and that suffix is going to be a numerical value and that numerical value is inputted by underscore dollar sign n again Konami code I'm not sure how that works but it's in the help and I do know that when you hit replace name everything in that's selected gets numerically ordered or numbered named numerically named let's go with that cool alright so this next part what we want to have happen is inside this weight tag this weight tag basically has a list of all the joints that are going to be responsible for deforming this mesh and currently as you can see it only has the spine joints in there we need to add the left arm joint chain into here so I'm gonna tap on that little padlock to lock it and middle click to select them all and drag this guy down in here so now as far as cinema knows the spine joints and the left arm joints are gonna deform this mesh this is our default state so we want to be sure to set the bind pose the new bind pose to incorporate the the left arm and let's check out what happens when we this and start playing it okay so a couple things it's not deforming the mesh and it's not following along with the current joint chain so let's um stop wait reset PSR and rewind okay so we need to address those two things we need that joint chain to follow along with the rest of it number one let's do that if you look at the spine it would make sense that if you're looking at from the top down that this arm chain would cannot connect right here and I think that's one two that's this spine for joint we want that to kind of connect with that so we can take this left arm joint chain and make it a child of that spine joint and you'll notice that a new bone has been created so that's good that that seems to make some sense so let's run it again okay I'm gonna turn off snapping here that's good we've got a joint chain that the arms move with the rest of it right [Music] but we also need to have that same characteristic that that we have going on in the tail so let's fix that so like that reset PSR and then rewind so in this left arm you can I could say you could probably copy that but I don't know what that's gonna do if that'll freak it out so let's just make a new one character tags i k and under here under tag we want to define the end of the chain which is that left arm v and you know at this point we also want to turn on dynamics and basically we can copy these same values here which is 180 20 so 180 20 and we also need to go back into our forces and set that 2-1 that's kind of how all this magic happens and then turn off continuous update and now if we move it and run it what happens so the arm is moving along it's bouncing along I guess it get bounce a little or drag you know a little more but it's not moving the mesh and it's not moving the mesh because even though we have in our weight tag you know the left arm joint chain is listed there we're missing something important in the actual weighting of those joints to the mesh and what do I mean by that let's reset everything and rewind and let's shift click shift double click rather this weight tag that's gonna open up this weights manager this weights manager is a visual representation of how these joints are influencing the mesh as you can see as I'm like clicking on each one of these spine joints a different section colors gets colored and that's to show you how much influence this joint any particular selected joint has on the mesh so that you know this spine this first spine joint only controls that portion in red so let's look at the left arm what's going on with these joints if you select them it's all black black means there's no influence whatsoever it is however getting influenced from spine 3 and spine 4 which is not what we want we want to it's it's fine for the body but the arms we want to get rid of we want to we want to have those get deform by these new joints that we're introducing so how do we do that come over here to your character tool and our character menu and go to the weight tool and let's lock that because what we want to do is under options we want to erase and 100% we want to erase some of the influence that spine 3 has on this portion of the mesh you gotta be careful here because depending on what you do you might end up erasing some of this stuff if you're not careful by like you know you did you definitely just want to be thorough here about which portions you're erasing so we want to make sure that all this all these joints get erased and you'll notice these numbers here see this as I hover over with the weight tool it'll tell you it says spine for 100% it tells you the influence like any any particular point on this mesh let's just dial right in here to this guy right here 507 that's a point that exists in the weights it's all these points of this mesh are numbered and 507 somewhere down here has an influence of a hundred percent by spine for if you hover over it it gives you the little you know indication of what joint is actually controlling it and how much of how much control is being exerted onto the mesh by the joint so spine three we just we just erased all that you can erase all this make sure that it's all erased and spine four if we tap on spine four now you can visually see and with the numerical value you know it's got a hundred percent so we're telling with the weight tool we're telling we're racing the strength of the selected joint spine for over these points so I'm just getting a bigger brush stroke here because we want to just get this done faster I think there's probably a faster way to do this but we're almost there so I'm just gonna keep rocking this okay so now when we hover over you should all be zero zero zero we're getting visually you know a visual feedback here that there's it's all black and again black means zero and that's gonna allow us to make these guys influence the mesh instead let's just um we can paint we can you know paint this stuff on here so instead of a race we can go to add and if we select the joint let's just select number left arm to which is this middle one here we can start painting on this and I'll insert that new color but you know I find that this approach is really suited for like fine-tuning things you can you know really what we want is just more bigger broad stroke kind of things because I don't want to you know sit here and paint every section and go arm three okay that's this joint I know that I'm gonna need to paint that and maybe part of that and part you know arm for is this and then when I look it all together that looks cool it looks like it's it's gonna influence it just fine but the problem comes when you start deforming it so I'm gonna temporarily put in a gold tag here and that gold tag is gonna show up right there under coordinates this is a really handy and really helpful thing to do when you start when you need to go back to something you want to zero something out and these values you want to return to this state you know that this null sits in this space right here and it's associated with these values but that's way too confusing we want to do something called freeze transformation if you say freeze all it'll take all these values and put them down here and it'll zero everything out up top here and if that's handy because now when you move this round if you ever need to get this null back to the default state all you have to do is hit reset PSR BAM and it jumps back to the spot where you last what you first you know hit freeze all freeze transformations so that's good we want that we like that okay so now what we want to have happen I just put this in here temporarily because I want this um joint chain to follow along with this with this mesh I mean with these joints and something seems not to be working properly here why is that let's go back here and these joints should be moving along with there it is you know what I think did we have to be turn off our dynamics here let's turn off all our dynamics for right now so selecting both those I kate agz we can disable dynamics and now let's go back to zero reset PSR and then rewind and so now the only thing that that really should be happening on a second yeah I think I said that too quickly now I'm getting all sorts of messed up I turned on the the dynamics and this arm goal is probably what's freaked out somewhere so let's reset that and then rewind rewind alright that's our default state let's turn off dynamics I wish there was an easier way to do that so if you guys know of any way or stumble on something let me know right I'm gonna bend this joint chain a little bit and you can see that there's weighting already on there but that weighting is nowhere like you know uniform or in any state that looks like natural so in our weight tag the weights manager I just painted in those weights just kind of arbitrarily and this is when I was kind of getting back to you is that when you start painting these weights arbitrarily you kind of don't know like I've got too much of one thing and not enough of another so I need broader brushstrokes to kind of dial this in first and then I'll make fine-tuned fine-tuning adjustments with the way tag with the weight brush so how do we do that let's let's make zero all this outlets kind of blow this up go to our weight tool go to options and then just here let's just erase everything like we did from the start let's just kind of race okay we'll leave that joint chain bent so that way we can see the changes that we make in the weighting with this next approach so rather than using the weight tool what I'm gonna do is go into the individual joints themselves and there's something called fall-off and that fall off is a magical word that enables you to get a shape in the form of a cylinder and if we size it up enough let's say you know 30 by 30 that's a very familiar-looking thing if you've messed with mograph or any of the you know any of the fall-off since I'd cinema you know we like that shape I like that shape because with the fall-off enabled now it allows you to strengthen or taper off the strength of its effect and so I'm now I'm painting weights with this cylinder shape that I can size up that I can move up and down left and right on the X and y and the z axes so that's super cool so let's sum we want to kind of dial this in let's let's get something like 25 25 and then 23 this is the length of the thing but as you can see it's not having it's a little hard to see if you it's dark but this portion of the mesh here isn't being controlled by the fall off because the fall off is just not big enough so we need to size up the size of the fall off size up the fall off to where it encompasses the individual portions of the mesh and that's really cool because now we can take this same approach and do it to the rest of the joints down the chain and right now it's black and right now it looks all messy but let's go to the fall-off and enable cylinder and generally you want to you know copy the shape that you're that you're you know most closely that the mesh is closely shaped mostly closely resembles I can't speak um all right so let's just size these up again let's say 30 by 30 and this last one is ridiculously long because it's 100 centimeters let's just pull that down and if we select them all you can see the fall-off is affecting that portion of the mesh except for here and here and I think that's because certain sections of this the cylinder aren't long enough in z space so what I'm doing now is lengthening the fall-off along the bone so that it overlaps with the previous bone so if you look at this area here this fall-off ends up right there and if you turn on that one this one ends up over here so if you enable both together there's definitely some overlap there that we want and so we just need to do the same thing for all these other joints down the chain and this one doesn't look like it's a little large enough maybe oops let's make this 35 by 35 maybe larger 40 by 40 something's going on there what we'll come back to that maybe it's because this guy's not worried my 40 that's definitely large enough but we just need to make it longer okay so yeah let's just figure out what exactly is going on here let's just make this larger and once you come out of the weight tool like by hitting the you know move tool clicking off one of these joints it should bring you back here and let's just run this and see what happens I guess we will need to enable uh dynamics there shall we run it there's definitely something weird going on and how can we figure out what's influencing it looks like something's other than the joints are influencing that section and maybe we missed something when we painted the weights so let's go back to our default state and rewind and let's turn off the dynamics and if we shift double click into the way tag to bring up this and go into our character weight tool now we can see spine 4 that's our culprit that still has some left over I don't know how that happened I thought we erased you buddy erase go away all right so now if we move this arm goal that's a pretty good indicator of you know how much this stuff is is getting influenced and at any time we can go in and tweak these values and as we tweak you notice that the mesh kind of responds a accordingly you know we're adding some more influence of this joint onto this joints that we're overlapping now and that's um that's way easier at least in my mind and then you know at this stage in the game to be messing with this fall-off stuff than it is to be painting the weights on manually so we'll go back to our move tool and click off one of the joints to bring us back here and with that arm goal that looks like it's bending pretty cool like cleanly I should say okay let's reset that reset PSR and let's actually get rid of it because the next thing if we kill that and then go back here to our reset bind pose it should straighten that out there's a little kink in there I don't know if you saw it but that's our default we would I'm constantly going back to our default state because this next part is what we want to we want to take this whole exact same setup and mirror it over from the left side to the right side and we can do that with the help of the mirror tool if we enable mirror tool and select middle click our left arm let's close out our weights manager for this because at this point I think we're happy with the way that those things are weighted we just need to move it on over so select all our joints character merit tool and let's select everything because I think all these things are defaulted or set to default what we want to do is replace left with right and everything is going to get cloned here are copied as we flip from left to right so all the positions are going to be in the proper place the weight will be in the proper place and hopefully the points and all this jazz will get mirrored over so let's just let's run it and see what happens mirror all right so we've got new joints and we should also have a new joint chain that's also named right okay yeah cool so left arm right arm and that right arm let's see if everything is moving right or weighted right so let's uh let's do our temporary ad goal here and we'll select that and freeze that transformation so we can zero it out later and it looks like it's working so now we can take we can reset that get rid of it and let's test it so we'll move this guy in the timeline and it's not moving because we need to select our left and right arm I Kate agz and enable dynamics and that's funny let's see what happens if we rewind and play so now as we move it cool so we're getting some movement now just like the the original joint chain although that joint chains not moving either because it's disabled so now everything should be floppy cool so that's kind of the gist of it we got you know these joint chains in the position that we want them they're weighted properly and they have the same characteristics as the tail and we did it all without having to you know break the previous rig and you know all the same kind of rules apply and and the important part is just the after you've gotten the weighting of the fall offs the way you want them and I think this is the last thing let's let's revert back to our starting point rewind and let's turn off these dynamics so once you've gotten these guys in place it's pretty good habit to in our wait manager here all this stuff is being calculated on the fly you know at least as I understand it this is not really weighted in there you I think it's doing an extra calculation basically so you can select these left arm these joint chains these new joint chains that we created and get rid of the fall offs and actually bake the weighting information to the weight tag so in the weights manager select all those arms and then hit bake effectors and then what happens is all those fall offs get reverted back to none but their influence is now kind of baked in into the joints so as we click this you know all those sections all these joints have that influence on that portion of the the mesh and that's one less calculation I think it's got to do so it doesn't have to do that on the fly anymore it's kind of important to do that because sometimes when you're moving this guy around after we enable our dynamics again which will notice is sometimes the mesh hole as you move it if you move it too quickly some of that mesh you'll see some popping going on it's not doing it here anymore because we've baked those effectors and that's essentially what that'll help alleviate so take that extra step bake those effectors and once you've gotten that in place you now have a character with an extra extended rig let me one other thing this is handy on the arms you know these arms no longer have that the end goal and so as it flops around you know this is these these it moves and then it stays in place and moves and stays in place in that same position so you can you can still go through here and you know in these I Kate agz add the end goal to each one of these guys or add a goal sorry you don't need to drag anything you just hit that button and you get these extra goals at the end so you know that guy doesn't need to stay up there if he's like swimming in in in some heavy water or whatever and and you know he's going up against a current his arms are gonna be kind of aimed backwards as he's fighting the current and now I should move it you still get the undulation but now his arms are in a different spot so you can animate you know these arm goals and you know as you do it's helpful to take those out of the joint chains so you can select them easier and reposition them you know anywhere you want and also you know under when you select them go to object and instead of dot you can make these things like cubes and make them really noticeable like that see this joint chain is way off so now you can actually see them and of course you can also color code them too so left arm everything that's left would be you know colored blue so if you go here to basic use color and say on you can select the blue color and everything that's red would be right it's just an easier way to kind of help you know identify things inside the viewport when you start color coding things and now it's easier just to you know tap on that and then you can select it he said oh that's because I've got this here's another little quick tip this is the selection filter and right now it's only selected the spa spline so it's only gonna select splines this main connector here is if I stop it that it just turned it off I just turned it off it was previously only set to spline and that's why I'm not selecting any joints when I do this I'm not selecting this these nulls I'm only selecting this spline so you can turn that off or you know make it say these nulls I only want to select nulls so come over here and instead of splines and joints I'm only selecting nulls now so selection filters are really handy for you know going in and rather than going through this approach and it's like where is it where where is it it's here in the viewport all I need to know is you know select that guy and so I can move him pretty quickly so now you can move his arms and if we select both null ant spline we can move into so that's another little tip I hope that's helpful I know it's a little convoluted so if you have any questions please fire them away on the comments below hit me up on Twitter it's at demo fleas de ma FLE easy and if I can make if you guys you know need some help let me know or if you have something an improvement to this I'd love to know how to you know stop get it to get to my default state without having to you know reset PSR rewind and get to there there's got to be an easier way to do that I'm sure somebody enlightened me alright so until next time Cheers

Channel: demafleez

Views: 134,272

Keywords: Cinema4d, C4D, Character Animation (Field Of Study), mograph, Training

Id: RUeY1HMXvFM

Length: 34min 2sec (2042 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 02 2014