Maya Rigging a Character with Advanced Skeleton - Part 02 Joint Placement [FOR ANIMATORS]

hello help me out with video 2 of reading with a client skeleton the free tool for for rigging I've used before years so let's get to it so last time we prepped the model got all symmetrical and where I can clean it up through the basket and clean at all so what you do is you open a brand new scene we've saved at the model as a clean model before what we're going to do is you've got a reference in the model so here we click on reference or you can go up to file reference and then it's only showing MB file see if you go to my scenes of show everything at the MA and MB and simply reference in the file in shortcut for anyone that doesn't know what reference is it referencing in is as opposed to importing yeah it's quite important I'll try and give them a quick explanation here actually so if we have our model beautiful model so this is the model that we made and cleaned now we want to bring this into our Maya file for rigging which is what we're doing now so they bring it in for the joint placement so if we create a new mod file and we just simply imported it in the model would live inside the Maya file you might be thinking well that's fine but there's a problem here so if we're rigging away we finish the rig and then we're ready to use it so then we use this rig in you know three four five a hundred different different Maya files were doing some animation we're animating some scenes all is good and then you or the client comes back and says I want to change the character I want to put some different hair I want to put a coat on or something then you are in a bad situation because then how the heck are you going to update five ten hundred two hundred different animation scene files so this is where referencing comes in if we we have our model this time what we're going to do is we create create a new Maya file like we have done and instead of importing the modeling we do what's called referencing which is what we've done so the model then gets referenced in it looks exactly the same but it's different the model doesn't exist in the Maya file it stays outside it lives here in its own Maya file so the beauty of this is that now you know we finished the rave we go and use it in lots of different scene files comes back we need to make the change all we want to put big shoes a big belt on a watch on the character we then do that all that work back in the model file and it updates through the system in all the different files so we only have to update the model once that's what referencing is I'll do a video on this later to explain it properly I mean it is also really important that you never import a rig into my file animate you always reference in case you have to change any animation but you are left with a problem then you've got a nested reference which is which is a reference in a reference in a Mar file and so it might scale and has a clever little publish button but you publishes the rig file which but by it it does actually import the model into the rig file but you do keep the original so you do you will end up with three files really so one you'll have the model two you'll have the rig file with the model referenced in then you'll have a published rig number three the final published sorry it's a bit hard writing with this brush published rig which is this imported in into here but then anytime you can make a change to it to the model republish and then all the preferences will be updated you can see I hope you can see the advantage of this sari of this crappy drawing but it really is brilliant imagine if you've got like a hundred two hundred scenes your director or your client wants to change some animation you would be you'd be screwed basically so referencing is really important always reference in your model or definitely the rigging to do the animation hope that helps right let's get back to it so here we are back in Maya we have referenced in the character no advance scale and automatically puts your your model or honor on a layer you can turn on and off and it sets it to template which is hitting the little T here so our T is for template R is for reference mean meaning you cannot select it for you to put your your joint placement in now I like to work in real world scale so I've modeled this character as a young there's a young girl anyway so let's we finished with the pre section now so now we can bring that we can start to bring in a skeleton and fit it to our character you've got a few different presets here that the biped biped bendy which is like all bendy limbs and lots of different animals and things like this I'm just gonna stick with the normal the normal biped for sort of you know standard film feature film whatever it's a good quality rig and you press import and in comes the rig you got to make sure you've got joint showing and curves otherwise you won't see it so it comes it comes in quite small but Alexei I like to work in real world scale so you get this you get this base selection and as you can see it's got lots of labels toe n toes heel roots chest so what you want to do first of all is scale up and we just start fitting it into our character so I'm gonna just scaler up I'm gonna go it is sometimes good to go into a fourth you or keep swapping between the front the grid gets in their way but here so you can click here to get rid of it I'm going to carry on scaling it up until I get the chest about in the middle we do want the route a bit lower but we can move things around in a minute just it's just sort of general general placement for the moment so I'm going to go up to my move tool so you can move move anything around in the viewport it's good to swap between the 3/4 side in front to get these in position so you want you you you'll sort of get used to where placements are the clavicle should always sort of go sort of in line with the neck release because you've got the shoulder then the clavicle and they when you're animate and they do both they do both sort of Bend together this way you never ever get just a rig just a shoulder it will just collapse the top so I'm going to work my way through and just position some of these now if I go into the perspective view I think most of you may know but you quickly show you you can move in world space or I'll show you here you can move in I can't move this but if I want to move a joint at the moment if I hold down the W key and press I'm in world space II so what that means is it's moving in relation to exactly the world x y&z it'll move back it'll move up it'll move this way X Y Z if I change to object mode it will move down and in the direction of the joints going see so if I move it back to world moves and I move it this way it's exactly in world relations and you will end up swapping between the two so um I have a bit of a preference here myself I know this this see through the wireframes it is quite good some people might like it but I actually prefer to see my mesh and and use x-ray joints now if you click here you can't see your joints anymore so there's a little button here that gives you some x-ray joint so you see all your joints come in and you can switch between the two so I'm just going to I'd like to switch with indices I'm just going to start generally placing this as you can see we need to move this back the hand goes back and what you want here is I also tend to rotate in two places what you do what you don't want to do is you don't ever want to move this up and down at dish you want to try and keep lines of rotation still so I'm quite used to sort of sometimes rotating into place as well and then from the top view you know you can you can just get this into place you might want to put wireframe on wireframe on shaded mode so you can see the actual bit and things there I'm going to come back to the fingers in a minute let's see what we've got here I'm going to go to a side view again I'm going to press x-ray joints what I'm going to do is the cloves are getting in my way here so I'm good when we did the cleanup I lost all my layers so I'm going to do a bit of a cleanup and let's just let's just get this far already so that we can hide things get things out of the way so I'm gonna move the dress and buttons to its own layer layer and create layer from selected you know automatically add those and you can hide them or if you haven't selected it you can simply right-click add selected objects Teesha again great layer from selected tshirt hide that I'm going to put the hair as well I'm gonna put the hair on its own layer I'm just gonna grab the whole whole hair group in one go including the hair bands great layer from selected we'll just call it just call it here and hide that it just makes things easy - we're okay with the shoes as the Irish at the moment so let's get back to where we were a side view I'm gonna hide the grid what we're going to do now is we can if you if you just move we we are just moving everything into place if I want to move the knee it's going to move the foot as well so what we're gonna do from here you're gonna press the D key I think the insert key works just as well as well and you can go back to wireframe if you want to and when you move the date hit the D key you're positioning just the one single joint again I'm working in in local rotation mode we want to get the ankle up into the position of the alcohol where it's going to rotate I'm gonna hit the D key again because I want to move this a little bit a little bit forward hit the D key again because I want the toes up I'm just gonna move into the front sometimes I jump jump around to perfect things you can work your way up if you want or you can you can just you know work your way up we'll just jump from views like me I'm a bit sporadic like that so I'm going to go to the front view and let's position the whole of the leg let's get this right I'm gonna go into world mode because if I did on object mode it you know I want to move it straight out of a right angle I'm gonna move out sometimes I do need to rotate this in I don't whatever you do they'll ever get the foot and do this the break that you'll you'll break this line and the pole vectors the knee controls will just be way off always rotate into place so get the hip roughly correct where I want it and then rotate it into place I'm going to start positioning the toes I'm gonna make sure I'm in object space move it out big toe you can see I've got toes inside this model but for this it's going to be fully trainers on this is the edge for the for the for the foot rock and I'm going to go back to shade up after that the heel looks good where it is I'm happy with that let's move our way up now we're gonna have to move everything forward definitely this is too far back at the moment so I'm gonna go into world space because the door had been moving up and I'm gonna hit my D key because I've positioned my legs I don't if I if I didn't have it in the D key you will see that everything gets moved out a place to tip the D key we can move where we want and I definitely want my hips to come down roots gonna have to go across you generally want a sort of s-curve in the shape of your show before Spiner meaning your model might be shaped differently you don't want it down right in the middle I prefer to have a little bit at the back that's the way the spine bends and then you're gonna get the chest move that forward as well and then you want kind of like even spaces in between the chest I mean I mean it doesn't have to be exact but you know you're the more practice you'll get they're not nothing is set in stone anyway so the neck here should be at the base of the neck then I'm going to hit the D key again because I want to move all of these up in one go so this should be this one here should be at the base of the head see the creature of the head here and this one should go right up above in fact you can even go above the hair so just in case let's let's turn our hair back on and just move it right up her there and then hide the hair again I'm gonna move the jaw right forward we are actually going to use the advanced skeleton facial rig setup anyway so it does override the jaw but it's good to have it in the in the right place anyway hit the D key again so this is where the jaw pivot you can you can imagine as the jaw as this rotates this way where the jaw will open this is the eye joint I'm going to import the eyes back in in a second and we'll just move this over here and get the end on just poking out because the end one doesn't matter it's it uses this to rotate the eye wherever you're going to go that's okay for there okay it's looking okay from the side on there going to a front view again check my things I think the route should be should be lower generally should be just above the hips maybe around the belly button area and sometimes you know it really depends on the topology of your character and by the topology I mean the way the polygons flow so if I turn this back on this is the way the polygons flow you generally have more polygons where the knee bends and you know this character is short stumpy in a bit you know sort of cute sort of looking character so it's going to be different anyway clavicles looking good shoulder sometimes I do come back and change this so it depends on the deformation so if you can imagine if this was here and it rotated here the the arm when it's folded would be into the body so you don't want that when it's folded you want the arm to be sort of you know next to it really seek it even before to move that a bit more again so again this takes a bit of trial and error it depends when you skin the character and and and on preferences as well the elbow is tucked in in the elbow crease that looks good okay it's not looking too bad all right let's go up my arm now real quick viewing the top view sometimes it's a bit hard to see in the top view especially when you a character with a huge bulbous head like this um okay so gonna move this forward a bit I'm gonna rotate it's always good to have a little rotation in the joint if this is a little angle if this angle was the other way the arm would flip backwards so that's really important okay let's move on to get the hand burn so the wrist wants to be where exactly it's going to rotate in the wrist if it's too far back you'll get a really bumpy if I'd if I rotate this can you imagine the hand would rotate from there will it look good so the fingers here we go so that the thumb just just just drag that into position here then here for the first off and then rotate around and then they'll start moving these out in object mode and local rotation access mode and then again take a bit of trial and error but these into place doesn't take too long I will move these out one rotate in a little bit just get them into general position in first so this first is for the this first metacarpal will be on the on the rotation knuckle let's move this out this one here so I've got quite this it makes a bit done with difficult cuz I've got quite fat chubby little thing is here actually but it shouldn't be a problem this here is where the the the cup of the handle girl is this good at sore cuffing motion you can use I'm going to hit the D key because if I wanted to lose what I've done there and what I'm going to do is the joint you a little bit of a big ear so in advance get it and you can also obviously go up to the traditional I'm bringing menu and go skeleton and change the joint size up here but if an skeleton is linked up it has it all here so you can go up and shrink things down so he may things a little bit smaller for these type of positioning it makes it very easy to position things so I'm going to now going a little bit tighter and I'm going to turn on wireframe because I want to get these in to the knuckles so that Ben should be on that one that Ben should be on that knuckle and then this tip should over overlap not cool not cool overlap knuckle this one here and I'm gonna go back a bit went too far and then we'll persist in this back rotate it in again and drag this one out it's good that they just overlap off the end of it and I rotate this into place a little bit more just have to keep perfecting it really there we go let's move the fingers up so you can move them all at the same time if you want you know what you're doing here so 1 2 3 4 they all need to come up so you can just you can just move them up depends on how your hands modelled and then the fingers are in a little bit different positions they're not all dead flat that would look like a some sort of shovel so I'm now going to go to the side meet I'm gonna go take this up a bit I'll turn off wireframes I'm always flicking through different modes whatever sort of you know helps me see better I like to have a little bit of rotation so if you highlight the one you're on it makes it bit easier to see as well so that needs to come down a bit let's highlight this one looking good sometimes your eye fingers might be angled a bit as well so you can actually rotate these but what you want to do is make sure obviously the Y plane if you do this and when the finger rotate it will take in at the moment and we just select all the joints just to show you an example of a finger curl when you select these and rotate them this is the motion we're going to get so advise skeleton very clever it does it does work out a lot of the rotations but it's best to get these things things right otherwise things won't be rotating in the right way see there I might actually just because my mind's modelled a bit more steeply there I might change that around a bit now let me just turn this back on so I can see within that list for this one and move out that's a bit too much you should really take this in a bit now this one in a bit okay it's not about it doesn't take too long at all and that you know once you I'm doing this quite slow once you once you get used to it you can really sort of do this quite flashy you know you could probably do this in five minutes then what's happened there let's just bring that one up just gonna double-check the knee front you want the knee to bend in the right place yeah it looks pretty good okay that looks pretty good so what we're gonna do now is do get the eyes in the employed it's gonna be line up with the eye here make sure you keep saving your work by the way so I always like to save version numbers so I will I've got a new folder character Riggs Isabella this will be is Isabella underscore very underscore the oh one I like to save everything the stages because then it's easy to go back it's really important okay let me turn this off Shadid I'm gonna bring in my eyes now because if you remember I have different sort of eyes that had sort of from some my nose and stuff on them for coloring in things which got stripped out when I did the obj so I'm gonna bring them in therefore I'm just gonna import them in saved them here and obviously I've got the same scale so everything is this fitting nicely I've just gone to shaded mode just wait for the textures to kick in here they come so let's get the eye chart in place this has to be right from the side and the front let's go to a side view and this time I'm going to hide everything everything is still on that high-res layer anyway so I'm gonna go to here and we're going to get it in the center and you need to do that from the from the side and obviously the front now we want these I'm giving you a little bit of a because most eyes especially when I model them that I do rotate them off a bit because otherwise you get this funny I'm gonna forward staring sort of our look so these eyes actually all rotate it up so it's it's quite hard to find the exact center so what you can do here is we can use one of the a little little trick to find the center I've already got the center of the pivot you if you haven't got this if your if your pivot point isn't the center just got to modify center pivot and it'll appear there okay I'm going to just go into wireframe for this so what we want to do here is is neither make sure your pivot is in the center you can go up to display transform display local rotation axes and what that's giving us is a tiny little little node in here and that is exactly in the center so that's brilliant that's exactly what we want cuz let's see there are I was off we want to want to get it bang-on really fatigued obviously to get the ISO rotate properly so I'm gonna select the joint again zoom in and now as you can see we need it they don't and not just from this not just from the site we want to see that in the front as well and there's our little gizmo that we will be brought up to let's bring it across and there we go you could do that in the top as well if you want but now that's exactly in the center that's exactly what we wanted for the eyes let's bring back bring back the model going to shaded view I'm going to just bring up the hair just okay it looks pretty good so what I've wanted to is I want to actually add some extra joints in so it's not a skeleton is brilliant I'm adding custom joints for all sorts of things I want to be able to control when an animate her pigtails so from here and we just save this again what we can do is we can create new joints coming off the head joint for this I'm gonna go into a front view turn off wife let me show you so what we're gonna do is they've got this little button obviously this is just access access in the the commands up here for you but it is all all capped for us in here so we're going to create our own little our own little joint system now I'm just going to F everything will get mirrored you you can't set it to not married but it all matter gets mirrored forward switch to all-in-one for these pigtails so I only want a few joints so I'm going to say we want one by one by the head here here here here and I want one here and that should give us a little joint chain let me just see what this looks like is really yeah that should be quite nice you can have more joints if you want as well to get to get more deformation I mean what this will give you is this will give you a control to each point as well so you'll get a control here here here and here so I'm going to move this out here let's put this into wireframe mode right I'm going to serve active mode obviously it puts it exactly in line with the grid so we need to move this back now so let's move this back here and from a top view you can see that we were going to want to now rotate everything back here we go that should work well so then to connect it to the main break just highlight this and rig I like the main root drink and press P for parent that's P for parent now you can see it's joined to the rest of the roof might be good to name these rigs if you want to keep things clean so let's go to our I miss I'm hitting I'm hovering over and hitting the F key to focus in just like we would focus in on an area through the of the of a model or anything so you got joint one joint two and joint three I mean we can call this pig tail one tail two pigtail three okay just giving it one so this looks pretty good all the joints are in place you know and we can always come back and amend this you know this is you know we can do what we want with this shoulders in a good place okay I'm gonna save this and I am going to know run the rig I'm just going to show you actually an extra little tip that I mentioned about mirroring everything gets mirrored automatically but if you don't want it to you can you can add an attribute here so you've got all these attributes that come up here so you've got a twisty bendy in between there's lots of different utilities here that are really good so if I didn't for example maybe if I had just a ponytail just just one ponytail and I didn't want it flipped what I would do is I would select the the first joint not that the root joint the root of the head of the pigtail and if you watch over here I would go I want a no mirror attribute and I click Add and it creates it here and now when it runs when I plant skeleton runs it won't flip that it won't mirror it'll just be on this side that's obviously not what we want so I'm just going to just going to undo that if I can if it lets me and do it yeah okay brilliant I think that's it let's run let's run build advanced get in so we click the main button click build it'll run through it update the orientations it's pretty quick there we go there's the hit one may there's my pole vectors appearing and there boom bill bill complete and there's your and there's the rig it's not skinned or anything yet I mean the pigtail curves a very are just massive but if I move this here's the rig the knee controls if we if we had hadn't if we had put the knee off-center like I was saying Hank everything straight line these are be shooting off this way this controls here you've got your feet controls which will pick it up we're gonna over here we'll go we'll go through some of this later as well you've got your foot roll but everything seems pretty much in place is there anything amiss so it's just check that we think this is bending in the right place yeah my um you got the hip it moves a head joint the controls up here which will enlarge later you've got I don't use these for animation but they're good to test these out you've got your whole finger curls crunches wrist looks like expending at a good place we're gonna have to extend the curves of this out spine that's good the chest control is a bit hidden away we'll get that again and let's try them both together yep okay this looks good guys in the next video we'll we'll build a skin cage what we'll do a basic skin will test the defamation and we'll change the size these controls before moving on to face rig and we'll take it from there hope that was useful I'll see you in video 3 thanks [Music] you

Channel: Animator Artist Life

Views: 15,084

Keywords: joint placement maya, maya beginners rigging tutorial, beginners rigging tutorial, learning rigging in maya, maya character rigging tutorial joints & skinning, how to rig a character in maya 2020, Maya rigging, character rigging, character rig, Advanced skeleton, Maya tutorial, Maya beginners, Character animation, Joint placement, Autodesk maya, Maya 2016, Maya 2017, Maya 2018, Maya 2019, Maya 2020, Maya rigging tutorial, Rigging in maya, Maya bones

Id: 7_bqg6nhlSo

Length: 35min 9sec (2109 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 25 2020