Skinning Character Models; Weight Painting, Flooding and Tips [HumanIK/Maya]

and welcome to animation technically again so based on a couple of questions i've had from the initial videos one thing that someone was keen for me to talk about was the best practices for skinning a character so with this it's very subjective so i'm sure everyone will have their own methods to doing have their own tool sets and such i don't like to rely on tools where possible sometimes i have a base humanoid skin that i use something to get me a little weight into it if i'm using something common in this case i've taken a character a power ranger for a bit of fun um because i particularly like this guy but also i'm using the ue4 mannequin rig as well but i'm not using any templates this is just to give me a base to start with i'm also making use of maya's human ik as well as a way to re-target some animation so as you'll see here i have a second rig in the scene um thus i've retargeted this one too so for that reason i've got that as well um but first what you have to do is well add your joints and when i'm doing that i like to select from the pelvis so i don't include the ik and the root and everything because i won't be using them for the skinning definition anyway obviously binding skin keeping it to game ask for max influences because that's it's pretty standard unreal doesn't require if you're using unreal uh but it's pretty general and has been for some time unless you're doing something that you need to be super careful about how much memory you're using you might knock it down to three or even two but four's generally the rule of thumb anything above that you're looking at a lot of extra memory usage i don't care too much about the bi-method skinning method or normalizing because we're about to flood it straight away so blind skin obviously as well this is some a mesh that also needs to be cleaned up so i'm going to do that quickly so you can see i've just done a quick and dirty part on this to clean up a bit but with that done have a very simple skin pass and there you go how to skin the character no of course i'm actually going to do this properly um bad humor on my part but that's me so you don't need that you were anymore but as you can see uh my personal way to start with a rig is to flood it from the pelvis it's my personal preference as i've said um but i like to start from the pelvis and work my way up the spine down the arms then the legs um it lets me do everything in increments specifically 0.05 which means that 20 clicks is equivalent to 100 binding 10 clicks is 50 and you're going to hear a lot of clicking through this but i generally find that works best at least for me now most people probably use paint select paint select um because i didn't quite learn that way i have a habit of using the hot box to constantly select where i want to go and also you want to make sure you can't select your joints so you can just start from the pelvis plug what you need selection and go from here and that's how we're going to start um obviously we're going to start from the spine so we actually want to make a slightly bigger selection what i've got start from there on the belt i do remember as well that maya does allow multiple selection types at once um so when you're doing skinning as well if you want to transfer something to a single element of mesh you can select a mesh and invert select in order to only select those areas same with face selection it's always helpful to know and it's something i'll cover in another time as well when you want to look at transferring skin into updates or different characters to save you some time but we're just going to start to scroll through your animation you want your range of motion animation to cover as much as possible so 100 i've specifically kept a low poly character for this for this reason it's nice and easy and quick to skin up moving to the next one um what you probably want to do is enlarge and the group selections i use a lot and that would be alt and the uh right and left brackets and specifically the triangle brackets so that allows you to very quickly select loops up and down providing your mesh has to be modeled correctly assuming it's been through an fbx um importer or exporter at all come from a rips game you'll probably find that the attachments and welds are not correct so you might find that loop selection doesn't always work in the way you need it to which is unfortunate and that's the case here but it just means you get to see a few ways around it um so what we're going to keep this mostly in blocks and everything won't be precise to start with what you will see from this is that you can go back later and we're going to clean up using the hammer tool which technically i said no tools but this is a bread and butter part of meyer so i see no problem using that you kind of have to if you want everything to be smooth but you don't want to paint the weights physically there will be some painting weeks involved probably around the shoulders and the underarms that's generally what happens so when it comes to skinning on the pelvis because i've done this with the unreal four mannequin they do like to put a third joint in the center of the torso or rather the chest area it's a very rigid part of most bodies and you shouldn't expect much movement there i like to make sure it's still got the same level of skinning between each bone around it but you should find that your animator won't want to move that part of the body that much because it is a fairly rigid area of the body if they do and they just want it for stretch purposes or it's a a toon s character that's that's fine and that's what your job is as a rigor to try and make sure you are accommodating all the possible ways something could want to be animated or moved now i'm only working up the chest still so everything is still being flooded on the arms as normal and you'll see why later because eventually the influence here isn't going to matter it's going to be overtaken by what's on the clavicles and what's on the upper arms so it won't matter too much other than holding a bit there and so you can see that's our body done if you just go back you can see some very simple movement but it gives me the range of motion i want from it so we'll move up from here and we'll unselect everything and we'll make a new selection which will cover the neck area so because this has been done elements have been merged together it's really easy to just select the parts i want here and then i'm going to start from here and i'm just going to work my way down a little bit because i don't want the neck to be too influenced from this i just want some slight movement bearing in mind that this character is wearing a chest or a vest on his chest that's solid it's armor-like so you shouldn't expect too much movement there um obviously you know it's made of rubber in real life but the appearance is supposed to be something much more rigid and so we're going to skin it up with that in mind so i'm going to start by flooding 500 here and then i'm probably just going to move out now that's not to say i know exactly how this is going to look once i put animation on it and chances are you may need to put some other test animation on it to see how it looks what we're going to do now is just use face selection for these areas here need a bit more press section and using control plus one we're going to go to isolate mode which is also this button here lets you get around you know obviously seeing what you're doing gives you better angles on things it lets you see what you need to see so you can do more precise skinning now there we go so you can see how that's going to look and i can see obviously that's not going to look how i want it but for the moment that is fine that's what we need so we'll bring the head back and we'll get the head skinned up and we'll put that all asleep on the head bone see there's a couple of areas as well that haven't been caught by this because of the the incremental parts of how it's been modelled or at least how it's been ripped from the game it's obviously i could just do this and flood it but you do get into a bit of a habit and i don't like to constantly be switching putting more numbers in but you can do it that way so now we're just going to scroll through and we're going to leave that how it is for the moment except that part obviously you can see into the neck which is not good so what we're going to do here is loop selections you can see the loop selection it hasn't quite worked but a loop selection is selecting one vert and then double clicking on another verb when you have shift held down and that will form a loop in most cases and it's probably because of my battery topology here that it's failed on that loop but you can see there that's fine we'll clean up later it's just about getting a rough block estimate um there are tools and things that will do this as well as if you're willing to adjust the fallout everything on the bind options you can get something close to this but it's never quite one-to-one flooded or flooded in the percentages that i like to work with so that's why i often don't do this so you can see there's some chemical rays there so for this we're going to flood the arm everything and going from that everything 100 to the clavicle i just want to make sure that these areas aren't affected and i only have the core two rings around here which i obviously didn't yeah uh that was me accidentally doing control a and not control z which is again very easy to do when you're not actively looking at the keyboard you can easily switch over so if you press any hotkeys accidentally in most cases maya's going to be able to undo everything in the case of any catastrophic mistakes make sure you have your auto backup set to maybe every five or ten minutes depending on you know your own personal preference i suppose and hard drive size depending on how many copies you want to have so you can see that's there and what i'm going to do is just take the shoulder here and make sure you have what we want in the back without that and we're going to do a very light 50 see i've missed a couple there as well anything else i've missed you can see those two there will have to sort out as well which i will use to show off one of my other tools so you can see here in your skin box you have three core tools that you often find yourself using while you've got your copy paste and hammer which is essentially taking the surrounding verts i'm making average between them what i have done because i don't like using this i've actually binded them to my own controllers um this is actually a recreation of the ui from 3d max with a few extra of my tools handed plugs in but what you can do is just copy select paste and that allows me to clean stuff up like this and if i need to clean my skinning up as well i can call the hammer tool and that gets me something closer to that which is fine for the moment it might even give a slightly better percentage of that i think i prefer what i had before for the moment but with that in mind now we're going to move on to the clavicle the upper arm as you can see there we're going to go all the way up and what we want is roughly the under arm that's going to be our 50 cut off and we're going to flood it again up to 50 on the upper arm twist in the case of the e4 mannequin the upper arm twist comes first it's not the case in every system but most of them do tend to be it's slightly different with biped and if you're using human okay as well it does some funny things with twists if you're trying to retarget that's why my animation that i bring in that i'm retargeting onto this won't actually have any twist animation sort out you can see here we've got to keep this in line with this which we'll do in a moment and i will use that and i'll fix that by using my tool again but for the moment we're just gonna unselect the area under here you can see a few more bits where it's come away and we'll want to fix that soon too and now we can go a little bit higher and then we'll unselect just a few more to get roughly where we want to be so you don't have to be amazingly precise with this even if it's a much higher poly mesh you don't have to be amazing but it always helps obviously these connections around here you could one for one match but because this part is supposed to be rigid we're going to try and keep it in consistency obviously it needs to also touch at these points so we'll paste it there as well and that would line up if that match again the nature of the model um but it's always good to practice our models that aren't perfect because you can learn a few more things from doing that as well so it's an arm that well not perfect if we just flip this i can smooth out some bits and pieces as well where i have the topology to make it nicer i will and because you want things to be as smooth as possible ideally after my cleanup what i could have done this as well it's just done the weld plus where i flood all the verts so what we will do we will fix that at the end of this and i'll show you a quick way how to do that and clean up your verts i do you should have done it first but i was just thinking of the skinning today and now we're gonna nicely smooth out the uh influence of the joints from the twist bone to the regular bone before we look at doing the elbow so if you can see we've got this if you grow our selection up to there that's fine uh it does look like i was always asking into the wrong bone so what we can do here as well is just transfer over so if we lock every joint here except for receive this one and then we take our higher if we can select it our twist point we can just flood everything across to that unlock that and your twister and just flood it take it all and obviously you can only take what's unlocked so now you have it transferred got our selections back get back skinning okay and we'll start with not that much because i've got to set this back to this so there's a slight selection issue there which i might have to come back and sort out but for the moment don't worry too much looks like we might have some influence from other bones we don't want it to have yes we do but that is not what we want so we just play that off for them and anything else it has you can select with any selection if you press this here you can see what it has selected to do it you can see it now has influences from lots of other things because using controls ads in your skinning process causes issues which we don't want them but for the moment it doesn't matter because we'll be about to flood this little arm out once you've got to the point here so with that done we're just going to shrink the selection make sure we're growing our selection the correct way and we'll do it again you can see this has all gone a bit haywire because the group selection wasn't working so we'll just take all of this and we'll just slide it back to where it needs to be and we'll use this again to just copy do we have everything we want close enough paste it and there we go let's get a nice elbow bend animation which will be along here somewhere there we go so now as well i'm just going to plug this to get everything looking a little bit nicer again you can see how i've knocked enough topology right and i fixed it so we could do this and now we're going on to the forearm which nice and easy there because this part here is all solid so you just want to make it solid twists are reversing this so lower arm first and then the lower arm twist because the twist will handle your wrist rotation so we just flood that for a moment and then all we have to do is come back in here and talk this out so we'll start with the surrounding edges loop stations a little bit more than we want so we want to make sure that's all unselected see and now we're just going to clean up so we get a nice bend on that elbow so it doesn't have to be perfect um and you want to allow for a certain amount of intersection on the elbows anyway because it just looks nicer than having something completely collapsed we're not using any auto bones to hold the volume if you have a really high poly character and you're going to see them up close you might want an extra bone in between every one that's a rotation constrained halfway between the rotation of its parent and its child or at least what would be the charbonnet wouldn't be directly connected in the chain but uh an extra little branch of skeleton but what that will mean is that if you hundred percent it to that extra bone there you'll get 100 of the volume whereas 50 between two different bones you're going to fold it in on itself and the result just won't be as pretty as what you'd like so you can see here um you can see how i have some twist rotation on this here so you can see how it looks and that means we can just flood stuff up to look a little better but you've got to be careful when the verts aren't connected this is what's going to happen and that's why we're going to go back to that at the end and fix it but now we're going to move on to the hands and obviously the wrist again bearing in mind that the collar is supposed to be rigid we don't want any influence to go much further than that i've have some bones in there from another test rig i was using which isn't good i should have cleared that out first but that's fine here so we're gonna have it at that and then we're just gonna take those center ones off so we can finish the rest and that should be sufficient for the hand uh but you can see i've brought it away from here so that's something else you want to be mindful of again the loop selection not quite working where we want it to but it's working enough that we can get away with this but we want to flood it evenly so it's not perfect but a little bit of twist is okay and that won't really be noticed and obviously as well we have our twist bone here which is really what we want the influence to be between but i'm just going to leave a slate of this and because this is just a skinning test so i want to move on to the fingers doing something first the easiest it's also got the strangest area of influence because it comes all the way up here oh so two fingers in the same way after three tails and that's that i do them halfway between each bone and i just grab the selection a bit and when i have enough loops i let the next bone along have a little bit of influence from it but not too much just enough that if it's curling it can make a nice curl and as i said that can look nice on tails but it means as well you're trying to keep that look where possible so you can get something nice so you can see the area that's affected um by this and what still needs to have a bit of them so it's added to the thumb as well as the other bits so we'll do that first we can have some nice clean finger areas to work with and now we're going to try and fill in those fingers the upside of rigging stuff like this as well does thankfully lend itself to everything in most characters it should be mirrorable so things like fingers you have to do once per character um it does reinforce why having a template character to work from sometimes can be very important though because it can speed up a lot of the job um you can spend a lot of time making an absolutely perfect skinning template that's to your liking and then when you get a new character along you can just fit into that and you've got about 90 of the work done for you which is great for speeding up things on the job unfortunately it means you just have to grin and bear when you do things like this then you do us a lot but with any luck if you're skinning for a job um you might get lucky and find you have lots of diverse characters and you're not doing hundreds and hundreds of humanoids all the time because it does sometimes get boring but that's why you want to be trying to make tools where possible to sort things out like this you just clean up when you make a mistake or if something's been missed camera in now keep everything as simple as possible and with any luck you'll be working on characters that have hundreds of pollies which is ironically one of my next projects as well i'm going to give one of their the characters from the recent resident evil 2e maker skin and rig treatment as well for a test so i'll get to work on the character that's exceedingly high poly at the next i suppose next gen current gen level modern gaming we'll call it and i will be recording that as i go but probably not doing as in depth of a commentary for obvious reasons you can see a few things have gone wrong here and i'll clean them up after it's just my loop selection not being careful um actually one thing i will do and something you can do as well if you need to is just flood select all the joints and change the radius to something a little easier so that you've got better visibility on the hands as well and if you i mean in this case i possibly could have gotten away with just using one finger for both these fingers or one finger bone um but i'm doing it properly for this because i i care enough and the animation i'm playing to retarget onto this does actually have regular fingers so we'll do it right where possible and just kill the selection get the right bone selected you can see as well i make pretty good use of the hot box and i wasn't trained in maya when i first started brigging so i i really did not like the hot box and i just referred to it as the mess most of the time because it felt like a mess of options to do what you need but once muscle memory takes over you realize how much time it does actually save you from menu navigation it's just a case of learning what you need really so i'm doing each time here is i'm using the hot box to toggle between this but i'm using q to close the skinning menu each time as well a lot more issues here of things not being welded which is a problem because we want things to connect together and so we will do them that way you can uh look forward for this as well for any standard rigging test for a game studio or something of the like it's probably going to give you a faster skin for a skinning test that is full of problems like this it'll be up to you when you want to clean them up for all the tests or work around them to show off skill uh it doesn't really matter which way you do it always be careful with your loop selection because you don't have a back facing tunnel as well if you select something here you will have verts behind it always make sure the uh navigation gizmo is roughly where you expect it to be otherwise unselect that area to make sure you do get everything out you want now there's just one more finger to go and then we're approaching the end of this finally i say finally of course we still have the legs to go as well but that's not as important it's also not as taxing as the upper arms it makes for a nice home stretch i often find i hope the very least this lets you see that i'm not the be all and end up with any opinion you should take on this but there you go it's not perfect but it is a successfully if that hand looks okay to me for what it is which it does because again it is low poly it's not the end of the world i will just have that no it doesn't make a difference so i'm happy with that for the moment obviously the fun part comes that lets you show off how much you've done via doing the copy paste rather the mirroring make sure your axes are correct x positive x to minus so we want to go mirror and now you'll see we have obviously it's not a perfectly symmetrical mesh you do have some cleaning up to do so we'll do that and then that's got caught in the influence as well and we have some cleaning up here with our uv lines so again possibly because of my uh cleaning up i've left a few issues here but it gives you a bit of a test to clean up if you want to i'm not worried too much because the arms won't go that high that often i'm just gonna flood here to bring us down and that of course once again i think it's time we fix this perfectly now before we continue and you also do that we're going to have to leave this because we're using retargeting through humanik it's not actually at its blind post currently so what we're going to do is unlock the definition so it goes back to its blind pose i'm going to duplicate it we're going to mesh tools we're going to merge and now if we delete the history and skin it to this and copy the skin across for copying skin weights this is my preference this works most of the time for what i need one to one in this case does everything because it's exactly the same mesh with the exact same vert count numbering etc this will work perfectly fine otherwise if you're using different mesh backing up with these two is always a good idea and now when we do we're applying this to get our retargeting network of animation we'll have this but we can delete the old mesh just rename that one so we have consistency and again moving there for consistency but now we won't have the same problem as we had before so when we do this and we flood it you don't get the same problem and we can clean this up again it's something you want to check for at the start of things but it's good for teaching to sometimes work with the issues before fixing them i just don't condone that if you notice a mistake from your model get your modeler to fix it that's the best solution now we're just going to fix the neck so we'll start with here and then we have the lower neck onto the spine that's enough influence i think and behind i'm just going to flood this across here as well and that's enough that's a bit tight so what you can do is try that and see if that looks any better i think it does so we're gonna do that i could just mirror it again but for the sake of two little bits here i'm happy with doing this again it's not how the actual thing would work but it's close stretch i think that should maybe be closer this would be much better so we'll do this here and then this should probably not have any movement or influence on it at all i'll see how that looks when it's hammered but i still don't think i like where that's going so what i'm going to do is bring it in in my tool menu i'm just going to select this so i can find out what ones influence and remove them so you can see that's influencing we're going to put this on minus and just remove the influences we don't and want gives me my line there and i can see about doing this so with loop selections well if you can if you want to loop remember vertex shift double click if you want a specific section you can start and end double click and it will fill in the between and for now i'm pretty happy with that i think that'll be fine so now i'm actually going to switch sides because that holster is there and we'll deal with that later uh if i was putting this into unreal i might consider putting that an additional bone there for dynamics but i'm not in this case so what i'm going to do is i'm just going to have that hard skin to the leg as well just to stop it clipping through but i'm actually going to skin up the right hand side and then i'll leave that till last and you see loop selection now works much better so i'm going to start here on the leg i should have there it is one that goes out i'll just go down and i'll bring it in here legs can be a bit of a crux point when you're trying to find a nice smooth balance to fit in you don't want to destroy too much of the pelvis waiting you want it to be balanced where possible but also bear in mind that there won't actually be a lot of leg movement in anything unless you're doing some crazy martial arts um which this guy actually might uh you want to be conservative try and plan for extreme movements just assume they won't always be happening the average walk run cycle etc won't happen and the vast majority of npcs or even in shootings and things that the animations aren't that extreme that the characters will do doesn't have a good range of motion to test off you can see how everything looks what you need and so for the first time i actually start painting some weights as well so now you can hold b and you can drag to increase the size of your influence but i'm going to change it to this profile so it's got a lot of fall off you can see i actually think that might be a bit much so you can always reverse as well until you get something you think looks nice okay if you want things to happen quickly you can just increase the amount of weight you're painting with just keep moving you don't have to use the timeline as well there are hot keys to move if you want to scroll through animation but i'm quite happy doing it this way i think it works for me so i keep this up again we're not using anything here to hold the weight although we do want to make sure we're getting nice consistent lines from the pelvis to the upper leg so that doesn't mean it could come in if it's a few bits just put a hammer in here to get it looking a little nicer and then they can clean up what's there don't be afraid to constantly redo your own work to get results you like because it comes neaten everything up so you can then just go in and clean up again if you haven't got it any amount of times i have re-flooded my work because i haven't been happy with the result it happens quite a lot so again don't be afraid but also bear in mind that the leg may not come back this high that often and just took a different angle so you can see if the lines are not giving you the smooth result you want again i need to lower the influence so i can get something nice here just go around make sure those curves are smooth that's all you really need to do same with the front just doesn't need too much movement just enough to get what you need actually bring in a bit as you get towards the top of the character if you're happy with that just do the rest of the leg if you want to we'll look up cleaning it we'll look at cleaning out once we've uh got the rest done and we've mirrored it because you have to take into account both sides when you're doing the pelvis like you will do on the underarms there these two areas tend to be the crux point of characters because you have more than two main influences fighting for domination you've got your upper chest here your clavicle and your left arm um or left twist in that case if you're prioritizing that whereas here you have your pelvis your upper leg as well um but you've also got the right leg to take in and you're gonna get stretch either way unless you're adding experience to hold that influence which you might be doing or you might not that's so while there is a twist here i'm going to ignore that for the sake of this and i'm going to start at the knee so i'm going to come down to that now i'm being a bit overzealous with this but just to show you off one way of doing it you see and now we're just going to go back i'm gonna take some of that influence out until we get a nice little bit of intersection that covers that volume and that gives you a mostly smooth result and we'll see this part of it we're going to be keeping rigid as per the the armor of the character of course this goes into this and but it probably would be separate if it was a higher poly model but we're just going to select all of that and we'll do 50 here and we'll select those for the two i missed and just having them into it as well and we'll see how that looks somewhere alongside summation will be some for animation i'm surprised i didn't do more than that but this is enough to just show exactly what we want i'll also remember um when i'm selecting like this as well um hold ctrl and shift to add or just hold ctrl to deselect from your selection so shift and control you add and then control you deselect um i don't think i've said that already so it's worth reiterating because it saves time with menus which makes everything easier now that might be a bit much but for a low poly character like this i think we're going to get away with it just fine and for the front here we'll just do the same thing with this again keeping it fairly rigid um you don't have to but it makes it easy when it's lower poly there's just a case of putting it back across to the other leg obviously i just have the part you want and now we are going to reverse that so we can scale across to this now you can see where the cleanup needs to happen it's normally along the center line in most cases but don't be afraid to get a bit more in from other parts just to get a nice result the hammer tool especially on low poly models can really save your day for the amount of time you'd have to invest otherwise in making uh a custom paintway character and you might find yourself in a game where you've got lots and lots of these characters to do so you're going to spend a lot of time and now it's just the case of doing this little holster which i didn't realize as well to everything so we'll start here and we'll just go this lecture now that and go to here was that part so it's not quite part of it is part of the valve so we'll take it to there once this next perfect butts we'll just add a little bit of pelvis in try and smooth it nicely between them as long as it's not intersecting too much i think we get away with it and there we go one skin character this is obviously not perfectly skinned but enough that you can certainly work with it and would probably pass for the game it was made for being included in and yeah thanks for watching if you have any comments um or things on this obviously if i took a character that was much higher poly and cleaned properly i would be here for days getting my skinning pass which i don't want to do for this and we just wanted to give you a general overview of how i work um and it gives you a sense of different ways you can do things make animations you can use to test stuff um different ways to select or go about your skinning process quicker ways to speed up the menu navigation either way um and yeah i hope this was helpful see you next time

Channel: AnimationTechnically

Views: 1,190

Keywords: rigging, skinning, maya, humanIK, animation, hammer, paint weights, 3ds max, power rangers, shadow ranger, 3d model

Id: iYJ6CKVas2k

Length: 43min 13sec (2593 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 12 2021