In this lesson, we're going to talk about something a little more technical called joint orientation,
and to do that, when you dislike the joint so we can see the Orient that they're in, so we currently
can't really see that.
So there's a tool to help us do that.
But first, we need to figure out how do we select all of the joints because we want to use that tool
for every joint.
So we go through here and shift and click and drag, select each one of these joints if we wanted,
which I just made these two sets that look equally the same for comparison sake.
We're going to see in a second they're not because they're joint warrants are different.
So if I click and drag select this whole stack, you can see in the Atlantor actually selected the top
most parent of the group.
So if I click and drag selected, that's not going to work.
One little script that we've learned in a previous lesson, and I think it was maybe the first or second
part of the course is the select high script.
And we can type that down here in the bottom left in the script command.
And we want to make sure that it's set to Mel, which is my expression, language, and select high
means, select hierarchy.
And if we hit enter, we can see that all of the selection changed here.
And if we look in the outliner now, we can see that we actually did select everything in the hierarchy.
And that's what this whole kind of chain of things is called as a hierarchy.
So we want to make sure we have everything selected to do that.
And it's it's a script we're going to need to use over and over.
So instead of typing it in every time, let's create our own for the custom shelf up here that we've
been using for the modeling tools and whatever else.
So let's go to the Mel script and we'll type in Select High again.
And there's a space there between select and dash high and we'll select this and then we'll middle mouse
drag it into the shelf and let go and we're going to say that's a Mel script and now we have it.
So it's a generic icon.
You can change that to be a different type of icon, if you like, from this button here and navigate
to a different one.
I'm just going to choose a different one that I have.
And then we can also give it a label here.
But because I'm using icon that already has the label in the icon, I'm not going to do that.
But we could say we could do something like this.
You can see why I'm not going to do that, because it, you know, goes over the top of the icon.
So if you don't have an icon, you can just use that and to say select hierarchy.
So, you know what the the tool actually is for and for myself.
I'm just going to delete that.
And now when we click and drag these things, if we use that button, we don't have to type it in every
time down here.
Now, it does that for us.
Cool.
So now that we have that, let's let's do that for both of these.
Let's click and drag them.
And you can see again, we have that problem.
So we just click our fancy a little button we just made.
Now select the hierarchy and let's go to Skeleton Orient joints and we'll open up this option box.
Now let's click toggle local axes, visibility.
When we do that, we can see that all of these kind of axes pop up and it's kind of similar to what
we see in the bottom left here and the viewport.
Normally that shows us the world axes.
This shows us the local orientation axes of these joints.
And you can see the one on the right has a very consistent orientation for all of the joints.
They're all going in the same direction except for this top one, like we mentioned earlier, because
it doesn't have a joint above it to point towards.
It's just going to stick to the world axis.
We can see that to the right as positive.
X and Y is up and Z is forward.
And if we look in the the viewport down here, that's how the world axes is oriented.
So it's going to default to that if it doesn't have another joint to point towards.
So if we take a look at both of these joints, they kind of look the same.
Besides the fact that the axes are different, they're built the same.
But if we select all of them, so we'll use the select hierarchy again.
And let's go to that rotate tool and rotate this one.
We're going to rotate it to the right and the Z axis, and they all rotate in the same direction.
And it does what we would expect it to do.
Right.
Cool.
So now let's go to the one over here where the axes are not consistent and they're not all going in
the same direction, just like the hierarchy, the rotate tool.
And we'll go to the right with Z.
And already we can see this is not behaving the same way as the other one, and it's doing a lot of
crazy stuff.
Why is that?
Well, because we have everything selected and we're trying to say rotate all in Z.
Well, each joint thinks Z is in a different direction, so it's going to rotate all the joints in a
different way.
So even though they look the same, hidden within them is their orientation.
So we want to make sure in our skeleton over here that we have the right orientation for all of our
joints because that could prove to be a problem later down the road.
And it's just a concept to be aware of when you get further into rigging that that is going to be a
problem.
So let's take a look at our skeleton here.
I'm going to move these over a little bit and let's do the same thing for our skeleton.
Now, let's go to the bones reference, which is the top node is just a locator to help us move in position.
It it's not actually a joint.
Locators are created from create locator right here.
And that's just how mine has decided to organize its quick rig rigs.
So with that selected, I'm going to do select hierarchy so we get all the joints.
So when I toggle local visibility on, they all turn on.
So now we can see that there is some difference here between each side and for example, just looking
at the hands one has why up?
One has wide down.
So let's take a look and see if that's going to really affect what we're going to do.
In general, we want our joints to rotate and its main axes in the and a positive value.
So let's just take a finger.
For example, if we click on one of these finger joints and we rotate it down, let's take a look at
the channel box.
Currently, it's all zeroed out, which is good.
If we rotate it down in the direction that fingers are rotated, we can see that it's at a negative
ninety seven and we would like that to be a positive ninety seven just for basically it's a best practice
really in and rigging that you want the axes that it's going to be rotated and most frequently to be
a positive.
No, that's just kind of what an animator is going to expect.
We take a look at the elbow.
We can see that that is the case in that joint and probably most of these that were built with a quick
rig tool.
Are going to be in the positive acces we can see here that might not be the case, but if we jump over
the other side, let's see if that's the same is true for the other side.
So that is maybe not necessarily the case.
So we need to take a look at that and see if that's something that we want to address.
If it is, we can open up this tool that we have open and we can adjust that.
So let's take a look at the fingers.
Let's go click on this one and we can say, let's have it negative.
So negative, the negatives should make it positive.
So let's apply.
We can see it flipped everything over here.
And now if we rotate it, it should be positive.
Cool.
And we did have Oriente children of selected objects or selected joints on.
So it actually did everything below it as well in the hierarchy.
So we can just go through and do that for all of these and hit apply.
And make sure that it is behaving as we would expect it.
Yeah, so it's it's a positive no.
Cool.
So that is part of joint orientation.
We might have to revisit this topic again as we are rigging and discovering things aren't rotating the
way that we expect them to.
So let's the spine, of course, is a big one.
It's going to be kind of similar to the example that we used over here.
So let's just shift select each one of the spine joints and then let's rotate it.
And we can see that it is indeed rotating how we would expect it.
You can just ignore the legs for now because we're going to address that later.
But in general, we want to see that all of these are kind of consistent in some way and are behaving
as we would expect it to in a chain specifically for joint orientation.
Thanks for watching.
The next lesson we're going to learn about rotation order, which is another important concept to understand
when rigging and when animating especially.
So we're going to learn a little bit about why it's important for animation.
Thanks for watching and I'll see you.
Next lesson.