Welcome to this lesson where we will discuss rigging props and I really encourage you to open up the
scene, follow and follow along, either with this video or right after watching the video on your own,
because to learn this stuff, you really need to do it and definitely encourage you to follow along
with the scene follows up included.
So what we have is a hat and it actually looks better than what it seems like in the viewport.
I've actually added shaders and everything so that we can use this later.
And if actually unhide the sky that we have here, we can see that there's these little gemstones and
it has this kind of felt texture and it looks kind of cool.
I think so.
Anyway, just so you don't think you're rigging something that's not going to be useful later.
This already is ready to go for animation and has all the shaders and everything that I've created that
is basically using a little more complicated network of shading than I discussed in the previous part
of development.
But you can definitely open this up and take a look.
And I appreciate to deconstruct how I made that shader.
So anyway, let's get on to rigging this thing.
So when we think about rigging props, we need to think about how it's going to be used and namely,
this is going to be on someone's head, probably, but it might also be grabbed and they might hold
it in their hand.
It might need to be on the table, all these different types of scenarios.
So, again, we don't want to just leave this as it is right here and start setting keyframes on this
geometry as it is.
We want to add control curves to this as well, but we need to take into account the fact that there
might be different pivot points.
Right.
So if this is on their head, yeah, sure.
This pivot point in the center might be good.
But if we hold down D and we move the pivot over here now might be best.
You know, let's say he's picking it up from the side and he's going to throw it over his head or something,
or maybe he's picking up from this side and needs to pivot off of a table so that this end stays on
the table longer, all those types of things.
So how do we address different pivots like that?
Well, there's one easy way that we can create a hierarchy of controls, that we can adjust that a little
bit during animation.
So let's first take a look at how this was created.
We have the geometry and then underneath that we have the gem's and the ribbon.
So when we have this in the outliner, this type of hierarchy, this means that these pieces are children
of this.
Right.
So if I if I click these two things and I hit shift P, that will unpack them.
OK, so now it's no longer in the hierarchy.
So if I move this, they don't follow around, so follow the hat.
So what I need to do is either I can minimize, drag them under the hat or I can select, let's say
I can do it from the viewport or the outline or I can select one and then select the other and hit P.
That'll do the same thing.
OK, so there's two different ways to do that.
And the gyms are kind of special because they are in a group and they're in a group because there's
just so many of them and it just helps to keep them organized and you can move them by themselves or
find you to just where they were around the hat.
That's pretty easy to do as well.
And how to group things.
Let's just say again, these are all by themselves.
I'm going to shift up and how do we get them back the way they were?
Well, we can shift select all of them and then we can hit command to group them and then I can rename
that and then middle mouse drag this under the hat.
So that's basically what I've already done to create this type of hierarchy that we see in the hat.
But this isn't useful for actual animation.
This is just kind of organizing the model so it can be rigged.
So let's take a look at this.
So let's create our first curve control so that we can actually use that to animate with.
I'm going to go over to curves and surfaces.
I'm going to click the circle here.
I'm going to expand that out so that we can actually see it.
And typically, you want your curves to be outside of the piece of geometry.
So it's easy to select someone to expand it.
So it's outside the geometry.
And then I can just parent the hat underneath this inner circle, which I can call hat control.
The only thing that I don't like with this is that this selection highlighting is always on right.
If you use parenting, the selection highlighting is on.
So every time I select this, it's going to be all these green wire frames and it's going to be difficult
to see the model.
So what I like to do instead and what is a little cleaner workflow is to use constraints and constraints
are a very important concept to learn.
And we.
So we've.
And kind of a one idea of a constraint, which is parenting, but there's also parent constraints,
so we need to differentiate these in our mind.
So let's go to animation tab and we can see there's a menu button here that says Constrain.
I'm going to tear this off so we have different options here.
We have parent point, orient scale, aim, all these different ones, and we'll go through them later.
But right now we're just concerned with parent and parent means both point and orient.
Point just means translation.
That means moving it, moving this thing around in space or that whatever moving is something in space.
Oriente is rotation or it means this.
OK, so parent is both of these in one button.
So sometimes you might want to isolate and just have one or the other, but parent is both of them.
So if you remember when we parent something, we select the child first and then the parent and then
we hit P, OK, that's the order in which we select things.
When we do a parent constrain, it's the opposite.
We select the parent first and then the child and then we click a parent.
OK, rewind that and listen to that again, because that is going to be very important and you just
need to commit that to memory because that that's the main difference there.
That's the main point that you want to take away from this.
So now that when we select this hat, control the selection, highlighting isn't on, it doesn't look
like we have the hat selected.
So if we try to move this, what do you know?
It actually moves because if we scroll down the hat from the outliner, you can see there's actually
this parent constraint.
There's a new item in the outliner and it's called the parent constraint.
So we can identify what it is pretty easily.
In the next lesson, we're going to add a little feature to this simple rigt so it'll be easy to control
the pivot.
Thanks for watching.