Maya 2020 TAIL RIG tutorial

okay welcome back in this tutorial i'm just going to briefly go over how to create and also rig a tail on a character so i do have a set of joints in place but we do not have the controls set up yet which we will do shortly just to show that i'll unlock this and make sure it's unlocked so we haven't got the controls created yet okay just a single character and we are using of course the human ik system so i'm going to come into my right view and i'm going to create a joint chain and we're going to connect that joint chain into the root of our skeleton okay so first i go skeleton create joints and i'm just going to run this joint chain along the top here just from around here holding shift this allows me to create a joint chains nice and straight by holding shift okay and i can adjust these joints because they are a little bit too high see that starting to poke off the top here and i can just come in closer so you can actually see that now i'll hit enter so i'll just bring the joint chain down a little bit so it's through the tip of the tail there about there that's a bit better okay now i like to rig the tail straight and then once i add the controls for the tail then i can you know create that s shape u-shape etc later on all right just makes it easier okay so let's now parent this this controls into our main hierarchy so i'm gonna i'm going to shift select the root after selecting the base of the tail and i'm going to go skeleton um connect joint make sure that parent joint is connected is selected connect so it's connected into the rig okay now next up we better name these joints because they're not named correctly so far so we'll come into here hit f there we go so just called joint one why would i open this right up see now there is a quicker way of naming all these if i just select them all i'm going to go ctrl and just go through and grab each of these and i can come up to because they're called joint 1 etc so i'm going to come up to modify and search and replace names and i'm going to take joint um okay and then i'll put it instead with tail and i'll go replace and there we go tail one two three four five much quicker much simpler fantastic so that's what we're after so next up i'm going to hide the um the base mesh this way we can work with this a lot easier and what we want to do is create what's called nike spline handle so go skeleton ik spline handle okay these are great for like tentacles and anything that's really bendy swishy swashy etc like tails um let's check out the options so i have them set up like this auto parent curve turned off and i've got number of spans set to three and then i will click the root and to the root of the tail all the way to the tip like that now what's that done it's created an ik handle and a curve down here you can see that okay so let's now come in here and i'm going to just hide these joints so as we can actually see the little ik curve because it is quite tiny it's behind there but it's very very small so to do that i'm going to come in to show and i'm going to turn joints off like that now i can grab the curve right click on that curve and select control vertex there we go so now in here you'll notice there's a whole bunch of little dots pink dots one two three four five six of them i've got so these are what control see they're moving the spline like that and if i were to turn the joints on you can actually see them moving manipulating those joints there you go okay so just for now i'm going to turn those joints back off and i'm going to select each of these little pink knots there's one there and we're going to go deform cluster that puts a little c a little green c right there and this is my first cluster and i'll call this tail cluster one okay now let's grab the next one so i'm always right clicking going control vertex grab this one and i just hit g on my on my keyboard to repeat the last action this one will be tail cluster two like that okay so right click ctrl vertex so i'm just coming through hit g repeat the last tail cluster three so i'll just do that for all of these control vertex just going down the line here this one too once again nearly finished what's this for okay right click control vertex there's another two here nearly done five and one more grab that one whoops not the ik handle i'm gonna grab that one again just there make sure you don't grab the ik handle and this will be tail cluster six there we go so i've got all these little clusters now what can we do with these clusters well for start we're able to select them and move the tail like that but what we really want to do is use these and place a control instead of a cluster so let's create a nurbs primitive circle bring this up to up into position first i'll turn on the joints as we can see what we're actually doing here again okay so we're just going to position these scale them just bring them up and rotate yeah um so i want these over top of the um the clusters over the c just around there they don't have to be perfectly in place okay so that's one of them and i'll just call this one tail control one okay and um we need to modify freeze the transforms now let's duplicate this a couple of times and each time i'm just going to scale them down a little bit and keep moving them across better to make this in my right viewport actually um scale this one down a bit way over here d um it's probably be better if i have my tail turned on one more and make this one smaller again not too small that you can't actually select them but small enough there we go okay great so i'm just going to name these tail control 2 tail control 3. oh great they're already done but you'll notice that the freeze transforms are not set on some of these so i'm just going to go modify freeze transform hit g to repeat g g and g there we go so now we've got our clusters and our tail controls so next up we need to constrain parent constrain each of the clusters to a control so to do that i will select remember select them in the opposite order so you'll select your control first and then my cluster just remember one thing here this is very important that very first cluster in the tail here it does not require a control we don't actually have to move it up and down it's going to be actually parented in to the hierarchy of the rig here so i'm just going to delete this one all right and instead i'll go to the second one so i'll go that one there to the second one here and i'm going to go constrain parent make sure maintain offsets on and i'll do the same for each of those so i'll grab the control i'll grab the and now i'll just hit g grab this one and this one oops better make sure i've got the right ones here oh they're wrong so i'll do that again that one and this one that's better hit g that's correct and this one number five and number five hit g and number six and number six and hit g remember g is just repeat last action okay so i can test these now and let's see if they actually move with it and that one's not did i select them in the wrong order okay this one here i must have selected in the wrong order so give me a minute and i'll just fix that to fix that notice it's all blue which means it's got a constraint i could grab all those right click and break the connection so it's no longer got the constraint there and let's do this one again so i'll grab that first and then come to my number four cluster constrain parent let's try that okay that's better okay so that's how you break a constraint or one way okay so there we go we've got that all in place we're nearly there by the way next up let's create our controls for the rig itself so to do that back here i'll just go control by the way if you already got controls created it's fine as well i'm just going to click the control here and it's going to generate all the controls fantastic i'm going to turn off the fk which are the yellow joints turn on my there see this one here allows me to view the joints fantastic so i'm in a good position now to take that cluster which is cluster one and if i move it up and down see that we want to parent that one into our root control here so i'll just hit p and we'll see what we get does it move with it yes it does nice that's what you're after that cluster needs to be parented to the hip control okay so the rest of them i can go grab this and shift select this this this and this one too all right and i will parent these all into that cluster there so to do that where is that cluster it's now let me check exactly where it is first it's up inside the geo let's grab that cluster i'm going to come in a little bit closer not that i can't quite grab that cluster because it's now been parented into the root here let's have a look it might be directly under it here there's the hips i'm not seeing it there so i turn off the joint so i won't select the joints there we go and if i hit f now i can see it in here there it is okay i probably would have been better off parenting this one later just would have made it a little bit easier but that's okay i will now select each of these controls here they are so i'll go from number six grab that like this and i'm going to drop those and i'm going to parent them all into this one here middle mouse drag and drop so i should be able to grab that cluster and move it yep and this root and move it there you go so it's all moving with the root now fantastic so it goes up and down that's what you want to achieve i can then grab this one it'll move yes this one it'll all move independently fantastic okay so i could now so that's the um how to create a tail control um how to rig a tail just to show you that it is working um i'll quickly bind this mesh better turn the joints back on joint selection select this skin bind skin and i'll just drop on a delta mush deformer just to see what we get here there we go nice nicely skin weighted out of the box with a delta mush deformer and test that yep fantastic okay guys that's that done okay and you can see the tail and action right there nice one okay so here we go thanks for watching

Channel: Michael Banks

Views: 3,914

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Id: bRzcdpn7m2A

Length: 15min 12sec (912 seconds)

Published: Thu Aug 13 2020