Before we begin the next exercise in learning some more principles about animation, I want to show
you this rig and how to set up this scene so that it's easiest to use this rig.
So if you've skipped ahead from the rigging section of this course and you haven't taken that, you
will not be familiar with the rigs yet.
So I want to explain this.
And even if you have taken the rig and course there's a lot here to learn as well.
So the first thing to consider is the fact that in the previous lessons we were animating the geometry
itself.
We're moving the geometry around and setting key frames on the geometry in general.
You basically never want to do that.
You always want to work on a control rig so that there's a hierarchy built in so that we're controlling
something other than the geometry.
So the geometry is clean and has no keyframes on it and that the key frames only exist on the curves
themselves.
Now these curves are what's called a nerve's curve and those are in this shelf and you can create your
own and play around with that.
But in this case, the rig is already built.
You don't have to do anything for rigging for this and you just need to open the scene to use it.
So one thing to consider is the fact that we don't want to be able to like the geometry like I just
described.
We want to only select the curves.
So there's a couple of different ways you can make sure that while you're animating, you're not selecting
the geometry.
So we could while we're animating, just simply click on this button up here, which is to turn off
selection of geometry.
If you right.
Click this, you can specify a little more specifically what type of geometry you don't want to select.
So with that checked off there, we now cannot select any geometry in the scene.
And that's a pretty quick way.
When I start animating, I just click that anyways.
And I also will click this one.
This one means that you can't select joints.
In this case.
There's no joints in this rig, so we don't have to worry about that.
But sometimes riggers don't hide joints and they're inside of geometry.
So sometimes you can't even see them unless you get four your keyboard or you can look inside but and
you can hit six or a keyboard, by the way, to see the textures of this rig.
It's has some procedural textures in it.
So you can hit six to show that.
But in our case, we don't really need to worry about this one.
But just for good practice, we'll leave that off as well.
But let's say for some reason we want to be able to select this little box here.
We want to select that geometry or the plane or something and but not this.
So what we can do is turn that back on and do something else.
We can select all of the geometry here and put it into a display layer.
But for us to do that, it's maybe a little tricky to select all the stuff and not the curves.
So let's open up the outliner and take a look at this rig real quick that I made.
So we get on the Windows outliner and you can see that the robot ball rig has a group here.
If we toggle that down, we can see there are these two kind of main groups here, the control group
and the Geo Group.
And we know we don't want to select the controls.
We just want the geo here and we want to put that into its own display layer and display layers have
a couple of different purposes.
If we hit this far right button, it'll take whatever we have selected and put it into that display
layer.
If we want to add something to the display layer afterward, like we forgot to select maybe the ground
or something, we can right click and say add selected objects.
So what this does is it gives us several different options here.
And let me just rename this so we know it's a no touch and we'll save it.
And what we can do, we can actually turn all the geometry in that layer on and off.
But we could also turn on the reference this T means template.
So it'll make it kind of wireframe even if we're not in wireframe mode.
But what we're interested in is the R, which means reference.
So we know we can't actually touch that stuff.
But if we wanted to touch the geometry of this cube, we can still do that.
So that's super helpful.
And I typically will set up my scenes like this before I get started animating so that I know I'm not
going to get into trouble later on by accidentally setting keys on geometry or joints or something weird
that I don't want to.
So the other cool thing we can do is put the controls in their own layer as well.
And I'll show you one other feature of display layers.
Now, if we play this back, I'm going to hit alt v, you can see there's no animation yet, but we
can see the curves.
Now, typically when you're watching animation back, you don't want to really see the curves themselves
because the kind of breaks, the silhouette, you won't be able to see the silhouette and follow the
geometry, which is what's going to be rendered later.
So the curves aren't useful to see when we're playing back.
So what we can do now, if they're in their own layer, as we can just hit the P little letter here
and this square.
So that's in playback.
When we hit Alvie, they'll automatically hide and when we stop playing back, they'll come back.
So that's a very useful feature and I think it's newer and Miah twenty eighteen.
So let's go into the next lesson where we'll actually begin animating this and learn a little bit more
about the principles of animation.
Thanks for watching.