In this lesson, we're going to begin to learn how to animate a character and this is kind of the next
step in the evolution of learning animation, going from simple shapes and very limited range of motion
to a fully articulated character with limbs and spine and head.
So before we do that, I want to teach you what referencing is and why that's important.
Right now we have this Bones Rigzin open.
So and we've done this with the robot righ.
Right.
We were just using it in the scene and we're animating it.
Well, there's something called referencing, and that's important because what that means is we can
reference a rig in to a new scene.
And that way we're not actually affecting the rig itself.
So let's say we're in production or we're going to do more than one shot or more than one scene.
And all of a sudden we have a model update.
You would have to go through every single shot and update them individually, and that is just totally
impractical.
So what you do is, is you actually just referencing one rig file into each of your scenes that you
are using it in.
And then if you need to make a change, you just edit that reference file.
So we're actually in the reference file right now.
So let's go to a new scene, go file new and to reference a rig, we'll just go file.
Create reference and we can just choose the bones rig and click reference.
Also also have a few options over here and so it'll choose a namespace for it.
And it's probably going to go based off of the scene.
You selected namespace as parent.
Basically, it's the file name, right?
So it's going to say Bones rig and then it's going to have a colon and then say all this other stuff
after it.
This isn't super important to know now, but just know there there's a way that Maya tries to keep track
of reference things and that's what the name Space's so I'll reference.
And now you can see we have this kind of new little icon here.
It looks like the groups like we had before, but there's a little blue dot here.
I don't know if you can see that.
And you can also see the name spaces here.
So you can always tell a namespace by the fact that there's a colon in it.
And so it says Bones, Regg, Colon, Harig and Bones or colon bones Regg.
And I'll do that for every asset, every node group and joint and everything.
So that's my way of keeping track of of reference regs.
Someone sits on the keyboard to turn on the texture's.
So this scene doesn't really look that much different from the one we were in earlier that said Bones.
Regg, other than the fact that now we have this reference object and it's a new scene, but the power
of this can be demonstrated by making changes to the original reference.
So let's save this and I'll say I'll just say test for now and we'll save that.
And we could open up this scene here and we can make changes to this.
And then when we save this file, just say we want to make the head bigger.
If we save this file and then open up the one that this rig is referenced into, this change will happen
in that other scene.
So I've already done this in another scene.
I don't want to mess up our nice bones scene file some opening back up the tests that we have been doing.
And again, if we had made that change in that reference file, we would see a big head here now.
But because I want to mess up that original file, I'm just going to replace the reference here with
one I did use it with so we can go to the reference editor.
And that's basically an outliner for reference.
Trigg's, I'm going to click this and I'm going to choose a new path here.
And we know it is called bighead here.
If I go down here, underscore bighead so I can just type that in.
Enter right here.
This is telling you where it's referencing the file.
So you just type in that new one and reload or just it'll reload.
So now you can see it has a big head.
So we didn't actually affect this in this scene.
We did it.
Another scene that's referencing and again, the power is imagine you had, you know, a short film
or something and you had 50 shots and you made a decision halfway through.
You know what?
I want something a little different about this model or or the rig.
Usually it's the rig being updated.
You'll start animating and realizing you don't have enough controls or something.
And you can go back to the reference and update that model or the rig using what you've learned in the
other parts of this course, and then you'll have it in your animation.
So when we learn this walk cycle, we're going to use a reference rig just as a good practice.
So I'll see the next lesson where we will begin working on a walk cycle.
Thanks for watching.