Welcome to the first lesson on rigging, where we all cover one of the quick rig tools and discuss what
is rigging, why it's important and why we need to learn it, basically, if we're going to animate
this guy and we have a model here, how do we go about animating it?
There's no way to control it.
It's just a bunch of vertices and faces.
We could maybe try to go in here and set keys on vertices and not be very inefficient if we just picked
certain vertices and tried to move them around, try to create a pose.
You can quickly see we'll get off model, which when we're talking about 2D animation, they always
have to worry about.
And they had model sheets to make sure that you never got off model.
And the volume of the character was always the same, each frame that you drew it while 3D animation.
What we need to worry about is not so much keeping the character on model, but using the model that
we have in a way that we can animate it.
And that's what rigging is, is basically adding a skeleton to this piece of geometry.
So we need to add a skeleton to it.
How do we do that?
There's a couple of different ways and we'll start with the simplest way.
We'll go up here to the rigging tab and we'll go to skeleton.
Quick, rigt.
We'll open up a new window here, and you can see that we actually have just a one click solution here.
And luckily for us, this model will work decently well with this.
Depending on the model you have.
Definitely feel free to open up this scene and follow along so you have this model and can play with
it as well.
Once we get going here, someone hit auto rig and it'll say we need to choose a mesh first.
So we need to select them and then click the button.
Now, you can see a lot of things just happened and it makes the model look a lot more complicated.
You can see the outline or two.
A lot of things were added.
There's a new icon over here, a couple of new ones.
This purple one is a joint and that has all the joints in here.
And they're indicated by these yellow pieces here that are kind of these triangles with circles at the
end.
And right away you can see that there's a few errors.
You can see that didn't place the elbow in the right place.
Elbows more in the forearm here should be up here.
But for our purposes, just so you get an idea of like what rigging is, we're going to use this quick
rig to a real quick for discussion purposes.
So we've rigged this thing.
So what happened is it added bones and then it weighted the mesh to these bones.
And that means that each one of these vertices was giving a value to say, you know, especially in
the spine here where we have a lot of different bones together.
This vertices here might be weighted to this joint, maybe 80 percent and maybe 20 percent of this joint.
And so it'll have a value of zero to one, which is represented by a color that we'll see later of black
to white.
And it basically says, you know, follow this joint this much.
So once we start moving this, it will be a smoother transition between joints.
So let's grab the end a handle here for the hand.
And as soon as you start moving that around now, we can actually control the character.
And you can see it's not ideal.
Like I said, the elbow's in the wrong place, but you can get a sense of why rigging is important and
how it's going to work.
We're basically going to create a series of joints.
Then we're going to weight the mesh to the joints and then we're going to need a way to control the
joints themselves.
And that's what these nerve's curves are.
And we haven't used them very much.
And the first modeling course, we use them a little bit, but we can use these as actually control
guides that we can select and manipulate, because just like we don't want to be manipulating the vertices
on the mesh, we also don't want to be setting keyframes on the joints themselves.
We want all that keyframe animation to be on a control.
And so that way that we can actually go to show and hide the joints.
So that only thing that we're going to deal with and so that we don't accidentally select the joints
is just the control rig.
And that's what all of these little points are.
So we can start to see how we can manipulate the model.
And we can also see the problems with the quick rig tool is the the joints aren't necessarily exactly
how we need them to be.
We also have no fingers and the foot is a little generic.
There's no way to really roll the foot off of the toe or the ball, the foot and the natural way that
that someone would walk.
Currently we can just move it around.
But there's no way to pivot the foot off of the ball.
So of the foot.
So we need to address that.
And this is also I'm explaining all of this, the reasons why we're going to make our own custom rig
with joints, eh, so we can learn the entire process because not every character is going to be the
same.
You're going to have, you know, human characters like a bipedal character like this.
You're going to have quadrupeds are going to have aliens, you know, even props, which is what we're
going to start with so we can understand some of the basic concepts of rigging.
But I wanted to just introduce you to this real quick so you can kind of actually have something to
play with very quickly in the first few minutes of opening up Maya and the scene.
So take a minute and kind of play around with this.
The other thing I'll also say is if you notice something we're going to discuss later, if you notice
when we rotate the hands, follow the waist as it's rotating around, well, let's say there's, you
know, maybe a table over here that I want to place his hand on or box or something.
So let's just say there's a box here.
So let's say I bent him over here and I want him to lean on it.
All right.
So let's get his hand up here and you can see how the waiting isn't necessarily great.
It's it's flattening out his hand.
Really weird way.
So, yeah, this is not ideal, but basically what I'm getting at is so let's say we want to have him
to lean on this.
All right.
Let's say let's let's get him to bend his elbow a little bit so we'll make him lean more as we lean
him.
The hand is following his body and it's not sticking to the box.
So later in these later lessons, we're going to discuss having different spaces which are basically
saying, what is this going to follow?
What does this control going to follow?
Right now, it's following the rotation of the chest and the hips here.
But what if we want it to stay here and be in.
WorldSpace might be relative to the world, not relative to himself, so we'll discuss that later as
well, how we can do that.
But that's a quick introduction on to kind of what we're seeing is why it's important and also the reason
why we're going to need to make our own rig.
But if you want to just quickly get into Miah and look at how to rig something, definitely check out
the quick rig tool.
There's also a step by step process, which we'll do in the next lesson.
Thanks for watching.