Rigging using Advanced Skeleton

hello everybody in this video I'm going to be demonstrating rigging using advanced skeleton I created this red character by making a variation of my character that I constructed in my modeling a character with extrude video and the rigging solution I will be using is advanced skeleton which you can find that animation studios calm a you I'm very impressed with this rigging solution makes it very easy to create a very functional rig very quickly so let's begin the first thing I'm going to do is bring in a character from the content browser my reason for doing this is just to get a quick sense of scale I will be bringing this character into the Unity game engine and therefore I wants to get an idea of the size of my character I'm going to scale my character relative to the size of this generic mesh now that I've scaled my character I'll delete the human mesh from the content browser but now my character has some unwanted scaled data on it so what I will do is I would go to modify freeze transformations this will set its scaled data back to the default of 1 1 & 1 I will also delete history on the mesh if you download advanced skeleton you'll need to follow their instructions on how to install the first thing I'm going to do is to click on the advanced skeleton 5 icon and now that I have it open I'm going to go to the preparation section of a dance skeleton and with my mesh selected I will click on model clean and then I will click on create which will create a group called GL which it'll nest your your geometry under notice that in my outliner I have a new group called geo and nested underneath is my Nash I will then proceed on to body fit here you will find a list a drop-down list where you can select the rig that you want to create my model is going to go to the Unity game engine so I am going to select biped game and then I will hit the import button this will create your initial skeleton which will be used as a guide for creating the rig later on I'm putting my character into a layer so that I don't accidentally select it as I start placing the joints in my character and I will now proceed on to edit I'm going to enable fit mode clicking on the question mark will give a description of what fit mode is you I'm going to start with the root of my skeleton the hips or pelvis it's very important to not just position the hips in the front viewport but also the side viewport I'm trying to Center it and I will now move on to the right leg positioning these joints you can use both translate and rotate and as with the hips I wants to check not just the front viewport but also my side viewport carefully place the joints where you want the rotation to happen I modeled a slight bend in the leg so that I would know where the knee placement was and also because this helps with the Heike or inverse kinematics later on I will now place the ankle and I will check my front viewport and make sure things are centered properly this bone here represents the heel this is where the foot will pivot from when the foot is on the ground when it's planted now I'm moving the toe in place and then a pivot for the toe when that when the foot is also planted on the ground this bone should be at the end of the foot and I'll now move on to the spine I will place the neck bone at the base of the neck and place the head bone this bone you should put at the top of your character's head while my character doesn't have eyes I'll go ahead and position the eye joint where and I would be as well as the jaw which I also actually don't need for this character you I'll now move on to the scapula and centering the joints in the arm the shoulder area can be a little bit complicated on a character so be careful with its placement think about where you want the arm to rotate from and of course you want to make sure that it looks centered not only in the front viewport but also in the top viewport I'm going to use the rotate tool to rotate the arm so that it's better centered and I will position the elbow as well as the rest for the fingers in the hand I will be switching between the front viewport and the top viewport to properly place these joints I will be using both translates and rotates again thinking about where I want the fingers to rotate from I will place the ended joints at the very tips of the fingers and now that I've finished placing the joints in the hand I'd like to talk a little bit about placing joints in your character placing the joints properly will give you better deformation later on when you're new to rigging this may take a little trial and error but just take note of where I've placed my joints in this character the spine is going down the center I've got a bone at the tip of the head the bones are centered in the arm shoulder area being critical if you remember earlier I enabled fitmode fitmode assures that the joints are properly oriented I'm going to go under display pole vector and I will enable it this shows the pole vectors for the legs and arms which we'll be using I K generally the legs pole vector should be pointing straight forward and the arms pole vector should be pointing straight back be careful that these are not pointing in some awkward or odd direction and now that I've determined the placement of the joints in my character I'm going to proceed on to build clicking on the build advanced skeleton the rig will now be constructed this is really the puppetry system for posing and animating your character and now that my rig has been constructed I will select the character and I will go to deform option one I will click on the select deform joints and then I will click on set smooth bind options this will not only open up the bind skin options but also set the options to settings that are good for a gain engine one of the options is the max influences which is set to three this means that an individual vertex will be influenced by no more than three joints and after applying the bind I will quickly test my tests my rig and character the hips the feet stay planted on the ground because the legs are using AI K or inverse kinematics I can grab the foot control and move the foot and it will bend the knee the arm on the other hand is set to FK where forward kinematics so I pose it through rotation for an initial bind this is pretty good but there are some problem areas as you can see when I rotate the arm down the vertices around the side of the character get pushed in to fix this issue I go to skin paint skin weights and click on the tool settings box notice that if I select the right scapula it'll show its influence on the mesh brighter areas indicate a stronger influence here are the influences of the right shoulder if you prefer you can check use color ramp the hotter the color the stronger the influence the cooler the color less influence the blue areas are only slightly being influenced by the shoulder the hotter colors like the yellows oranges and reds are being more strongly influenced by the right shoulder and this illustrates the problem I am having with my upper torso the right shoulder is having too strong of an influence on those vertices in the tool settings I will select the scapula our and I will enable ad I will set value to a low number such as 0.1 which will allow me to incrementally add influence from the scapula and thereby taking away influence from the right shoulder adding influence to the scapula takes away influence from the arm notice that this is improving the deformation of the shoulder and upper torso area you besides adding influence you can also smooth influence I'm going to enable the smooth function and with the right shoulder selected I'll just smooth out this area a little bit you do have to be careful with this tool however because you don't always know where the weights are being distributed too you so now the right shoulder area is looking a lot better with the shoulder area looking better I'll move on to another problem area the head in the head the skull provides rigidity but if I look at my skin weights by selecting the head and notice that it doesn't have as strong an influence as it should I could use add once again to fix this but I think that replace will be a better option this time I will set my value to one and I will use my brush on those vertices in the head that is great when you want to gently add influence place is better when you just want to set it to a value an exact value now I'll quickly test the deformation by rotating the head control and it's looking better and we'll also test the neck control as you can see the neck control currently is hidden inside the mesh here's a little trick that I sometimes do when working on skin weights I'm going to translate the neck joint to an impossible position this will allow me to really see how my joints are influencing the vertices on my mesh once again I'll go to my paint skin weights tool and I will use the smooth tool to gently massage the area for better deformation and of course when I'm done with that I should put my character back in its default pose the advanced skeleton gives you an easy way to do this with there go to build pose button and I'll quickly test the neck area by selecting the neck control and rotating it I will now move on to the leg area and see if there are any problems there selecting the right foot control I will move it and what you will notice is that there are some vertices on the left leg also being influenced I will fix that by once again going to my paint skin weights tool and as you can see when I select the joints in the left leg but they are having an influence even if slight on the right leg as well I am once again going to use the replace paint operation but this time I'm going to set the value to zero this will allow me to paint away influence with the left-knee selected I can paint away that slight influence that it's having on the right leg unfortunately it is not just the knee that is having an influence on the other leg but also the ankle and toes is that the left ankle is also affecting a small area on the right foot so I will eliminate that influence painting away influences can be very tedious fortunately there's another way that we can fix this problem what I'm going to do is select the vertices in the right leg I will then go to Windows general editors component editor in the component editor you will need to make sure that you are under the tab smooth skins and if you go under options you can make sure that hide zero columns is checked this will make looking at this spreadsheet a little easier the rows represent the individual vertices the columns represent the bones or influences notice that I can select the values that have been set to toes are and zero them out this will eliminate all the influence that toes L has on those vertices and if I test this out by selecting the left foot control and moving it you will see that I no longer have any of these stray vertices being influenced by the left leg however the problem still exists on the left leg to fix this I will go to skin mirror skin weights now because I am mirroring my characters right side to his left side I need to change the direction by unchecking positive to negative I in fact want the mirroring to happen negative to positive I do want the mirror across set to Y Z so I'll keep that setting and I will apply now when I move the right leg you'll notice that the left leg has also been fixed in addition all the work I put in the right shoulder / upper torso area of my character has also mirrored to the left side and here's one of my other tricks that I use when doing skin weights I will create an animation that runs my character through a bunch of movements typically I'll do this before I actually start going through the skinning process with an animation like this I can quickly check the deformation of all the different parts of my character and then address them using the paint skin weights tools in conclusion I'll just share a couple tips for those of you that will be animating if I turn all objects off I will no longer be able to select anything in my scene if I then enable curbs I will only be able to select the controls of my rig this will make it much harder to break the rig by inadvertently animating something that is not supposed to be animated and one other tip I don't need to see the joints in my skeleton I only need to see the rig controls if I go to show and then deselect the joints I will no longer see them and that's rigging with advanced skeleton as someone who has spent countless hours custom rigging characters I really appreciate the ease of advanced skeleton enjoy this video and thanks for watching

Channel: Vad Almafa

Views: 2,466

Keywords: Autodesk, Maya, Advanced Skeleton, rigging, skin weights

Id: E1OnFEDfjEA

Length: 27min 18sec (1638 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 26 2020