Painting skin weights in Maya - PART 03 of Character rigging with Advanced Skeleton

hi welcome back to video 3 of the rigging with advanced skeleton just say if you're enjoying the videos so far if you can subscribe or give a like in a comment that really helped me grow and anytime there's another video producer you'll get notified anyway let's get back to it so so video 3 we're going to be going over some we're going to skin the character do some basic skinning and I'm going to show you some some formats of skinning and why we do it this is where we left off we have the rig we ran the build advanced skeleton so we have red while working as I showed you before but as normal and every time I do this I always see something I want to tweak I always want to you know once you see it in the body and how it bends I mean this this looks um the mid controller should be lower and a bit further forward so I'd like to show you how to update that as well there's a few other things now we've saved our character as I say always save as version 1 version 2 and then before the facial really get different stages so I can go back at any time but you do have this little button I wanted to show you called toggle and fit advanced skeleton if you click this it does go back to the mode where you can move the joints around it's really good I tend to just open up my previous file but there but the advantage of the toggle fit advanced skeleton button is that you can run this any time any time down the process even after you have skinned the character to the joints but what will happen is when you run this if you've changed your cows you know the control curves move them around you you will lose that and also the main thing is is that if you have skinned a to say rotate from here you go into toggle advanced after you've skinned you move it to rotate from somewhere else it will it will own your bit you'll have to read repaint the skin weights around the area it will still rotate from where you originally had it so that's just something to keep in mind so you can use this but it does save you you know you can be you know but almost for the finish Reb unit you know your animating that they can go back and change the joint placement which is really helpful so I'm just going to quickly go back in because this is a normal process you see it in the character and you do want to make changes afterwards so I'm just going to again hit the D key as before I want to I want to move this foot oops the D key again I want to move this forward a bit and I also want to move my chest focused a bit bit too far back that's a bit better for me I also would like to move this up just a tad it's a bit too low it's not quite on the neck and then what I have noticed is that the risk placement isn't quite in the middle you know I did these side kind of things so that you can see you know it's good to spot them and change them so I'm gonna go back to here hit the D key I'm gonna go to the front front view I'm going to shade it so you can see the model a bit better I just want to rotate this down of it because the hand does does Bend both ways so the the wrist is gonna have been from the middle here so that's better but unfortunately having lost off finger placement snow but it's not it's it is really easy to just select all these and move them directly up into position back into the fingers again so this is normal as I say having to go back and tweak the joints to get them to get them right well you know what after you build it and once you see it bending you think oh well yeah that could like I could look better a bit lower or a bit moved over and also I'm gonna just move the actually the clavicle for is really it's really far back actually just move that forward nice and in line with a neck there that looks a lot better and another reason I wanted to go back is to show you another little tool gives me an excuse to show another little another little tool which I use quite a lot I'm just gonna move this out because this is where it's going to rotate Fuhrman is behind the sort of hair back at the moment so I'm just gonna go into object mode and just remove the the first joint for the pigtailed out slightly so that rotates from within with inside the hairband great so I just want to show you another little tool is another reason I went back is I decided or some might decide in your pipeline that this is enough joint and you want to smooth more controls in the pigtail I mean they're not gonna move much anyway but this is a great little tool to show you so instead of deleting it trying to put new joint to move it around right skeleton has erm has a nice little feature so you select the first joint and then very angeling then you scroll down to here it says resample now what it's done is it's already selected the first and last joins the pigtail one in the joint five and if you haven't put the right joint you can simply press that and click pics or start joint and end joint and what I'm going to do here is for example I'm just going to bump up to something city like ten if a hip resample you see it works out all the joints for you so this is great if you've done like tails tentacles things like this but don't quit quite need that many let's let's try seven because you will get a control at every joints as one two three four five controls there and yeah that could be nerve could be good let's just see what it looks like with six it's just one more joint than we had before I think that'll be alright um let's have a look at seven again yeah let's go with a sermon that's fine it looks good okay we will get our control all the way so that's fine okay once you're happy with that so we've just made a few little adjustment a few little tweaks and then you just hit rebuild advanced skeleton to get back to where we were before and it will run through just as it did before updated orientations and it's working through we get the notice it says rebuild complete and as you can see the hair bands that we did is added controllers for every joints and now we've got more controls we're going to move the controllers out so we can select them properly but you will get we've got more joints to play with now can you see this so the Union that it's not going to move much anyway but it gives you a little bit more control of or defamation and now if we go into the hands select the end controller and you can see it's moving from the correct position oh and I've just noticed that I didn't move the thumb up so I'm just gonna quickly hit toggle refit so this is the kind of process we have to go through sometimes unfortunately it still would have worked this but it's just a click of a button it's better to get it right and rebuild again it's good that you see these processes you know so what you might overcome and look forth just helps you along with your process it's just rebuilding now and again bill complete there's the new therm in the new position that's much better there we go some so that's better so that's how that's how you tweak joints if you want I'm just going to save that so we're now on version to file save okay ready to move on so from here we no need to you know if we move anything is then nothing is moving with the rig at the moment so let's let's attach which is called skin skin white be the mesh to to the rig there's a few ways of doing that advanced skeleton has a lot of options so after the build menu you've got all these deform more options you've got deform off from one which is kind of like your classic just select the joints and attach to the buying skin is just buying skin options you've got option two now this is the one art I've always used I haven't really experimented with the others at all so you know obviously it would take me if you take hours and hours to go through all these options and it's just a case of just trial and error and different rigs and you can also go to advanced scale and YouTube channel as well to get all the information on the other options but you know my preference has been this this the skin cage what it does is it creates a cage and you just copy the weights over and what's good as it stays there so you can add say a coat and say copy weights and and and it's still it's still there remembering oh I've just run through it now reduce so what we do is we we've got our character and we will clip cage and create and what it is is it's running through and you can see it's having this like the sort of low poly boxes is it's going to go through you go it's doing all the fingers you can see it running through its even done some for the pigtails and then it says skin cage created so I'm just gonna hide my mesh and show you what that looks like I've just done hip Oh Oh be change the background in Maya and you can switch through backgrounds in Maya by hitting off thee I like to work with a gray background but just to show you the gray cage this is what we get so this is like the this is this is the cage it gives us it's really good as just a basic coffee and weights over to get them to get things over to the inn it copies the skin weights over for you so let's have a little look at that let's turn the mesh back on and we want our unreferenced the mesh now because we're going to want to select everything now what we can do is we can go through and I'm just going to do this to the hair we can go through with the see these little green lines what it does it lets us expand the width the amount of vertices it's gonna it's gonna affect and you don't need to do this a lot really so it does take a bit of trial now at Sabonis the default options are normally pretty good what I always do go is do it is going to the fingers this characters got very chunky fingers so if I just show you normally you would get something like this on most characters and they overlap so what you do is is by bringing these in it shows the area it's going to affect so what you don't you don't want to bend one finger and it pulls the other finger with it which happens a lot when you know in rigging and you've got to paint the weights out but but I'm a bit lucky here so it's it's sort of thin it's gone through the fingers anyway I'll just show you how to do it so if say if this was really fat I would just simply scale it down but you must keep them in mind that that it doesn't mirror so you have to say select all the end finger finger curves here the same on the other side and then scale them all together and it does both sides so that I'm just keeping that in mind it's got no mirroring on it I'm just going to go through and check this might cause a little bit of an issue here but we can always paint the wait site later I'm just going to whoops like exactly what you said I forgot it doesn't mirror so I'm just going to just bring these down here just just to see if that helps that because it is it is gonna affect the head I imagine it's going to click the image and drag some of that with it which it just can't be helped really let's see we could I mean yeah we can bring the neck out you can scale these in just one time um as I mentioned I don't think it affects it I think obviously because we've added these actually joints in it might give us a bit of bit of extra things to overcome but um it shouldn't be too bad so I'm just gonna I think that's okay it's just I would look at this so poking at the back of it a lot there let's extend the chest out a bit just cuz um it'll stop the folding in there a little bit more I mean you always have to paint the weights around the armpits anyway always that looks okay great so let me just unhide the mesh unhide the hair what we're going to do is we need to select all the polygons are gonna fit and just simply copy the weights now just a little tip as well I've got all my hair here you can't just if I went to select the group of my hair let me just find it there it is hair group you think you've got them all selected but it doesn't work with a cotton which you have to select them all so it's better to just drag and select at the moment we don't need to see the joints anymore so I'm just gonna go show none it showed polygons that's all we want at the moment we're not going to select we're not going to select anything in the face at the moment because that make its own facial rig skinning setup it probably wouldn't matter at the moment but it's safe just to just to not select it and definitely include the hair though because we we want to use that with the skin cage issues so I'm going to select all the geometry oh sorry let me just um unreferenced obviously I'm going to hide my let me just hide the eyelashes the brows and the mouth group there is a mouth group inside obviously I'm gonna hide my eyes I'm gonna select them in the moment so this is everything I want to select so oh and the air is referenced again sorry about that there we go we've got everything selected so this is what we want to skin you just simply select it just drag and drop select all and then we're going to go down to your skin cage option and click copy weights it's going to go through and calculate everything all the finger joints I'm still working it out my hair is quite dense as well so you go you can see in the corner just flicking through really fast working out all the calculations and there we go so that's how she's done night so it's giving us a basic skin - what do you can you can't delete these but I like to save them so I'm gonna just just gonna turn off my skin gage and skin curves and then you're going to go back turn on NURBS curves and let's see what we've got so I'm gonna click the work the midi-controller and straight off the bat we have actually you know quite a good skinning base I'm going to click my to select my foot just want a little addition you just want to run through and see oh it's the foreman obviously it needs quite a bit of painting wait for something that's automatic it was right here works pretty well the clavicle curves are hidden inside so we need to we need to move them out now I'll just click this go to build pose it's just going to snap it back in to build pose and and I've just noticed that obviously we forgot to do the close but that's the beauty of having the skin cage so if I turn on the dress and the t-shirt I'm going to leave the buttons for now and I think we're going to try and maybe river at the mall and we can't look and skin them you know we'll just try that out as well later so I'm gonna select my dress geometry and and the the t-shirt and like I say the beauty about the skin cages is you know it's still there it's still copied all the way so if we just go copy it's now copying the skin weights onto the dress as well so let's just take a little look and there you go if I hit the three key to smooth things we can just see how they're you know the distaff or mning as well so as you can see that's one of the controllers in a way it's really not that it is pretty good for just an automatic skinning great okay I'm gonna save the fall as well because as you know my can crash sometimes and it's just saving brilliant so let's get some of these curbs out the way there's that there's a lot that I'm hidden within the mesh so there's a nice little tool again with it in advance skeleton I'm gonna go into I'm just gonna hit this little button up here um I don't know if you know this but you've got a selection so you can say I can turn off the mesh it's the same as hitting reference here so you can't select the mesh I can turn off joints or curse but I'm just going to just going to do that for the moment and then going to go into wireframe just so I don't select my mesh I'm gonna select these go back to shaded mode and this is a great little tool so you can just quickly scale up the curve so if I hit to a scale of two there we go the clavicles are out the body I'm also thinking my shoulder controllers here that's not easy to grab while you're animating so I'm going to go do a 1.3 and then you go just so we can use them and grab them and these this one here definitely the chest and the mid controller and this pelvis controller here we're going to go up with maybe 1.4 we need them nice and big I'm gonna go a bit larger again so from here it's gonna go another one point one point two you go as big as you want really and and the old way of doing this I mean you can also do this you can reshape if I go show control vertex obviously you can't see them at the moment so let's go show nerves CVS and they will show you can actually do this you can actually select these things and just just just bring them out wherever you want you can reshape them if you want I can select this scale out do what I want and they'll still work so if something like we can see these are the IPA controllers they're hidden away at the moment so we do need to do what I've said any girl we just want to not be able to so I'm just gonna drag them out to the side one two so anything else hidden I think these are pretty low as well so let's just you know once you start animating there might be you might not see them very easily let's just move them up a bit okay you like to shaded view turn this some of these finger controls are pretty small as well I mean we can always come back to this as well let's get this hitman Trotter that is stuck in there let's get it down there and even move it a bit lower and go object mode and as you can see that it doesn't change the pivot point check the stays where it is you know now we can move the clavicle control some of these they're a little bit buried so I'm just gonna just gonna skate up these to scale this one needs more scale and I could have selected the other side at the same time but um but silly me I didn't scale and this one was again was an inner scale again you know if you wanted to if you mean these are fine for me but if you wanted to be able to really pick your you know curves more you can you can do what you want you could scale them out maybe the bigger reshape them and also and within this to you you can recolor things as well I mean I'm happy with the color me system they've got but if you added your own custom for others I actually just you know saying that for the headbands if we wanted to change the controllers we would just you need to select every single one so you select every single one but we will need to make this one bigger actually you know you might want to say okay I want one on the left side and the right side bigger so you can say just just just set the color you can set them FK controller is you can say selected which is what I use so you go selected and say if you want the curves to be red set color there they are I'm just gonna undo that for now let's make these two bigger I mean there we go until finished this populist one's a bit a little bit big Navy but that doesn't matter that this head one means that should be a lot bigger and probably moved up a bit so let's let's go let's go to on that get it up big girl because that is your head control let's have a look see how that one's working at the moment probably won't bring the joy yet that's fine okay save that that is how you adjust all your curves so let's look let's go ahead and paint some basic skin weights I just want to bring up one important thing is I don't do a full skin way at this point because if anything is going to go wrong it will be with the face set up so you don't want to go too deep in involved find out you have to go backwards or even sometimes start from the beginning and go backwards so you know let's just do a basic skin that we got to do and then we can come back and perfect it later you know I'm gonna do a little thing where we had some little controls to the dress and things like that as well so let's just let's go over a little few basics of weight skinning so let start with I'm going to hide the hair to get that out the way and I'm gonna hide the dress and it's just we're not going to see the body so let's just work on the let's just work on the t-shirt you know I can't select polygons because I've got that I've selected this the object selection I've here the button and I can select it again so what we're going to do is at the moment let's see how this is bending yeah it's not too bad but we want we just want to smooth that out a little bit really so you just bend it forward a little bit into position I mean that's with the wonky on as well the three key sorry as smooth let's go back into smooth mode so what we're going to do is you select you your your mesh you go up to skin paint skin weights but make sure you go to this little box which it brings up the options it's just on my other screen at the moment I'm just going to bring it over here and as you can see what it does is is it immediately changes view the white is what's weighted and the black isn't is it is is unweighted and it tells you what joint so if I click spine chest neck scapular shoulder right up as the left side you don't need to do both side separately there is just a mirror option scapula shoulder elbow so let's just do a basic and run over this so what you got is the chest just the chest joint selected and showing you what the weights are on the t-shirt there's three tools I use which is replace add and smooth now if I wanted to say when this bends I want it to also affect an area lower down I would click add there's a scale here this is your value if this value is at full but the opacity is down naught you're going to get not it's almost like a multiplier you never really want to up full when you're painting because it's just too strong so just you know just go Midway something like that I'm just going to show you the basics so if I want to do add more I would I could paint a bit lower and as you can see it's now saying I want the chest joint to affect lower down as well I'm just going to undo that I'm gonna go softer and now it's doing it softer and you can see just moving if I lift the mouse click again it does it a bit more so that's the add now you can use replace the replace can work in two ways it can work in add value or take it away what I tend to use it for is to take away I know and so say if you want to do remove this area under here you don't want this affected by the chest I would hit replace make the value of naught but the opacity then is your multiply so you know if you do not it's going to do nor I here it's gonna it's going to affect it really quickly so put it in the middle I do this click again again again again again it takes it away so that's the general premise and then you've also got um smooth you can either brush to smooth on and it's smooth the edges out and I tend to use what I have to do is is is that this at this point I just I just add quite a bit of smoothing flooding just to just just to blend things in and as you get quicker this is this this will be quicker and a bit easier and smooth if you to do so I click the chest I click the smooth and they click flood just like three or four times and then I might go down to the spine I might do it again there's a bit too much take it out and you see it's blending across the two it's going into the body bit but we're gonna book it we're gonna mix this in as you see see it's bringing it back out again go to the roots root to tie and the root and the hip because the t-shirt is affected so I'm just going to show you how harsh this is so it's best to put it in a position for so you can see what's actually going on so you can see the the t-shirts being affected quite a lot there so instead of going skin skin weight you can just hit Y which makes you itch brings you back to the same tall so now I'm on the hip I can see what we're doing is we've put it in a pose again I'm just going to select my hip one joint click flood a few times and you can see it smooths out lovely hip a bit lower and there we go compared to what that was before that's just to get Moodle back we've got a lot smoother let's move the flow if I do on the other side has we've only them one side that's what it was before and we've got rid of that crease in that collapsing so what you do now is just quickly go back to bale bill pose and instead of painting the other side just select select your mesh go to skin mirror skin weights option box now from I just remove this here at the moment of X is this way so if you were painting on this side and you want to demerger this way you would click positive or the negative but we don't at the moment so you put it back to build pose press apply and now your weights will have been mirrored for this this side you don't see it actually anything happening it just sort of works for you there you go so now both sides are exactly the same go back to Bill pose so that's generally it guys that that's a really sort of quick rundown on on on painting weights I'm just going to close this mirror one of the biggest areas you'll need to paint is always around cloud backup one-shoulder so for example say we want to bend the shoulder down see it's folding in on itself it will always do this you might have posed yours in a pose instead of a tea post you get better formations that way sometimes so I'm just gonna check on this again and I'm gonna go up to yo click the wire its skin paint skin weights options box let's bring this box back over and we want to go down to the let's start with a chair so my experience you know this is trial and error but you probably want to add some more to the chest so let's start with add and a small sort of weight and there you go I've just pulled it back out so it's already fix that problem and you can see obviously you could spend hours doing this perfecting it but we're just going to sort of go over its because we can't for now anyway like I said we do you need to get to the face and then come back and polish them the weights so let's just see how that arms moving now that's much better back forward it's collapsing a bit on the forward one so we can paint some more here let's create the Y key let's see what we can do with the chest maybe we just need a little bit of smoothing no so let's let's move our way up so let's go to scapula here and I'm going to try bit smooth in the shoulder with the shoulders you see the shoulders effecting this this bit over here we don't want that too let's paint this off replace nor click a few times to remove that okay let's see what happens if we oh and by the way if you hold the B key and you just drag the mouse left button drag that's how you get your size and to enlarge increase or decrease so I'm going to put it quite nice more for this I'm going to try adding a bit see if that helps bring out that's the wrong way so maybe we go to shoulder part two that's amount that way let's try smoothing some of that in and then I'm gonna smooth this in an Ingo back to my chest so it's always a violin area here I'm going to add a little small amount oops see sometimes is a bit tricky to get sometimes I might have to repose it to get it out there we go it's coming up there so now we need to maybe fix little that's the are we should be on the so now we want to go shoulder ad and I'm gonna bring this back out and then this did a tiny bit in there you probably won't see it but I'll fix that a bit of smoothing was good to shoulder are as well let's try a bit of let's get a little bit of flood in there let's see what the scapula is doing think the scapula is over to larger variant no we'll try a bit of a bend in a minute to see and I'm gonna take some of this out not that much take a bit out down here okay and I've also got I haven't I've got their t-shirt on smooth but I don't have the body on smooth so that would affect it as well yeah there you go it was poking through because it wasn't it wasn't smooth so that's you know again tried a narrow let's see what's moving like that looks pretty good deformation yeah pretty good so when he looked when a character lifts her arm up they don't just obviously lift their shoulder up that would look weird they kinda showed it gets to about here and the clavicle joins in as well that's not bad you probably see moved the armpit out and everything pretty good go back to the bill pose again you're gonna select this go up to skin I'm just getting hit mirror skin weights and it's mirrored it over to the other side there we go good so like I say later on I will come in and paint you know the back so the knees are all collapsing but let's leave that for now we can come back and and do that after the face because again if something something goes wrong with the face we might have to go back and we you know and we've done some of this work for nothing or it might take longer to fix again that the whenever you Bend an elbow it always collapses in so we need to add more here I've just really quickly show you it's really and really quick easy to paint so you will go to your right elbow and you will add on this side let's add a little bit give it a little bit Valley you'll add a little bit this side so you get a nice crease and then you will go to your shoulder part too and again add this at this side you see you got a much better bent and I would just freshen it a little quick smooth just just to smooth things out you might want to add some more weights to get a sharper elbow as well but as you can see that is how you know you would get a much nicer crease you can act like all sorts of the forms to make it perfect this is a cartoony character compared to this site now miles better go back to Bill pose save the rig okay so something we do need to do just quickly as you can see that jaws being affected by down here again it's going to get some new weights when we integrate the facial system but let's just go in enlarge our brush we need to go to the head joints so you've got it's just good then let me go ahead joint and there's no and even though we put a door in there there's nothing skin to the jaw at the moment and so I'm just going to just go out just bringing this back up I can say if you're going to get any problems it will be when you run the facial rig there's a lot more lot more that goes into it I'd just like to be as safe as possible and we could add a little smooth to get the neck been nice I just remember there's there's a tiny little jaw joint in there vision I like that we don't need that now there's a tuck there is another neck controller in here and it's got lost there we go it's in if I rotate this you can rotate from the neck so let's let let's scale that out there you go got a little lower and deformation is embarrassed bit creative you can fix that later go to build pose yep that's looking pretty good and we might want to just see how the the top of the dress is performance Enzo that would be on the front again we can paint those skin ways that's all okay it's actually to form in not bad really already which is quite lucky let's just have a look look at the hair obviously we're definitely gonna get some problems with the hair let's have a little look because it's definitely gonna affect the head so it might be good to take a look at that now so if I select all these joints and see what we've got that's not too bad not affecting the hair let's move this yeah so the hair is gonna need I'm skinning you can see it's breaking into that there but yeah that's that's okay so that it's definitely obviously needs a lot of smoothing so let's see if the smoothing will fix this and put it in a pose there you can see it's got a lot of a lot of lines where it's crease because there's a quite a lot of joints in there so I'm going to just click this button here it means I can't select curves I'm going to select all of these and hopefully we should be able to skin all the weight at the same time so I'm going to go paint skin weights option box we don't want these attach the head joints that at the moment have black which is great too pigtail one like Oh sharply let's try doing a lot of a lot of flooding on the smooth so that's just I'm just clicking away here and you can see it here getting smoother and smoother again I'm going to go down here the next one I'm clicking away dozens of times you can actually up the opacity for this and just get the smooth flooding quicker and you can really see it smoothing out here see as I click this it's gonna keep going let's go back up again there we go that's a lot better than it was it was all crunched up and crease before we don't need to do this because that's just the end the the end joint there we go that is that's a lot better so I can't select curves let me just turn this button on to select cars with one two three four five you could create a button later on you could um and part of the GUI and everything you could add it so that you can just select all these in one go there we go that is a nice pigtail it's just reset the deformations on here I could just click go to build pose and did from the side you might want to that's working really well really well he'd get some nice dynamics and bouncing its twists that's great there we go I will need to do the same on the other side but I won't I won't bore you with out I'll just do it off-screen I know I said I wouldn't do that I would show you every nook and cranny but all I'm doing is hitting the flood but another smooth about a hundred times so there we go guys that is basic and we we created a cage we copied it onto the rig we copied weights we didn't have the dress or the t-shirt this the cage was still there we copied the weights all working that was all working great we learned how to paint some basic skin weights so there's three tools that we use which is the replace the add and and smooth and we can use flood with with the smooth or paint it by hand later on we've all come in and and you know even these are working quite well you know but we the ankle is like all bendy at the moment so we need to we need to fix that and we will come back and do this later we just need to get getting get the head rigs because then if something does completely copy up then hope you haven't wasted too much time and you'll get used to this anyway so hope that helps again we'll go on to the next video which will be video four so that will be we're going to move on to facial rigging and if you like what you see so far you know subscribe here to subscribe button give us a like or a comment if you like anything else and I will see you in the next video Cheers [Music] you

Channel: Animator Artist Life

Views: 16,975

Keywords: Maya rigging, character rigging, advanced skeleton, Autodesk maya, auto rig, Binding, skinning, Maya joints, weight painting, maya 2016, maya 2017, maya 2018, maya 2019, maya 2020, maya tutorials, How to, Free tutorials, Character animation, maya weight painting tips, paint skin weights maya problem, joint influences, maya character rigging tutorial joints & skinning, skinning for animators

Id: 0IoI4-ZOInc

Length: 44min 14sec (2654 seconds)

Published: Fri Jun 26 2020