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61. Start extruding to make the inside of the mouth. Since it will rarely be seen, do what you can to make it easy to select instead of accidentally selecting the outside geometry.
62. Make the mouth, pull it down and close it off where the throat is. Beware you don't accidentally make the inside of the mouth poke out through the cheeks.
63. Skinny the center line. Copy flip attach. Since this is a quick model I lathed a quick hat to cover the head.
64. Okay, so honestly, I built the head in a separate model file because I didn't want to have to deal with hiding and unhiding the body I wasn't going to be dealing with. When I was done I selected the whole head, and copy and pasted it into the body model file. Put it in place and tried to get it to the right proportional size.
65. We're gonna attach the neck to the head just like we attached the hand to the wrist.
66. Get it attached, then worry about smoothing it out.
67. Groups! So when you select a bunch of cp's A:M groups them all together in the Project Work Space under the Model file, in a file called ..."Groups" (didn't see that coming did you) Your selected cp's are a group called "Untitled", click on the name and hit F2 (or doubleclick) and rename it, now these cp's can always be all selected at once by clicking their group name. (I make groups to keep track of which lines I plan on making the mouth furrows and stuff also). Anyway, if you open your named group (or open it in properties) and go open the surface part, and click on diffuse color, you can change the color of all the patches associated with the group. You can assign the splines to make it look like the character is wearing skin tight clothes, and also make something's transparent, or glow and stuff (play and learn). There's also advanced stuff you can do with groups and materials but I don't really know it very well. By the way under Tools->Options->Global make sure there's a check under "show advanced properties" and "Show property triangle" if these aren't checked I think you have to go through the properties window to access some things, but with them checked you can do everything from the PWS and make the properties window useless.
68. So here's our guy all modeled and dressed. Next is rigging.
69. So bones and rigging. When you bone a character you are assigning the cp's to specific bones. You must be in bones mode (see the button like a bone). When cp's are assigned to a bone in bones mode they become the color of the bone (here a swipe of cp's are all assigned to the red bone so they are all red as well.) To lay down a bone hit A and click and drag. If you hit A again the next bone you will be lying down will be a child bone of the first, if you start this second bone at the end of the first it will be attached to the first. A child bone is affected by what the parent does, if the parent is moved or rotated the child bone gets affected. The parent bone is not affected by the child bone. Parents can have multiple children. Similar to bones are Nulls, that blue looking bone with the lines sticking out of it. Nulls work pretty much like bones, but you can't assign cp's to them. I find Nulls easier to grab and see for translating things (like IK targets.) To make a new Null RIGHT CLICK and choose New- >Null. You can, and should rename your bones and Nulls in the PWS so you know what is what. A Rig is when you teach the skeleton to be fancier, like making the eyeball bones point at a Look Target null. You do this with constraints, we'll go into it later. I just want to remind y'all that you can get obsessed with building the perfect rig that automates everything, but don't forget in Old School days there wasn't even IK, so keep in mind that the best rigging tool is the animator's imagination who can just work around problems in the rig. In other words, get to animating and don't spend forever rigging.
70.So here we go. I drop a line of bones down one leg. See the little yellow handle sticking in front of the light green bone? That's the roll handle, it controls the bone spinning along it's long access. It's good to line those all up in a consistent direction. (I like pointing them forward.) Notice that the toe bone is not connected to it's parent. Notice how I started the upper leg bone inside the hips, that's because human skeleton's are like that, if you understand how skeleton's work it can help make your character's movement feel more correct. Finally the naming, I put the name of the bone first and then Right after it, this is because when I am animating later I will probably be looking at both legs at the same time, if they both start with femur they'll be right next to each other, if they start with right or left they'll be far apart. Also if you spell out Left and Right, and your skeleton/model is symmetrical, you can later mirror smartskin from one side to the other. You can name your bones whatever you want, I just like to name them after actual bones.
71. In the PWS if you select the parent bone (Femur Right) and then hold CTRL and click and drag it onto the Bones folder, A:M will make a copy of all the bones in the chain (called Femur Right2 etc.) If you select Femur Right2 in the PWS and hit N in the modeling window you can drag that new bone chain in place. Then just change the name from Right2 to Left.
72. Assign the bones. Click on a bone, then if you click drag you'll get a bounding box and you can select cp's. They will start flashing the color of the selected bone. If they are black it means they are part of the model but not connected to a specific bone (well actually they are connected to the ghost "Model Bone" which is the parent of everything else, but it's better to have the cp's attached to an actual pickable bone.) Hit Shift+G if you want a bounding lasso to select cp's with. If you are having trouble selecting cp's pop back into modeling mode (the little yellow man mode button) and hide everything else. The danger when copying bone chains is the copies have the same color, so you can accidentally assign cp's to the wrong leg bone.
73. So the shoulder's are actually controlled by the collar bone, which attaches to the skeleton at the pit of the throat. So I start my arm chain at the center line (but inside the model instead of in front because we don't have to be completely accurate.) By having the upper arm as a child of the shoulder, when the shoulder raises the arm will rise as well. Also notice I'm pointing all the roll handles up. After I finish each finger chain I click on the hand bone again (mustardy color) and then start a new chain, this makes the hand bone the parent of the new chain instead of the last finger bone laid down. Watch your PWS to keep track where parents and children are.
74. Again control drag the chain to the bones folder to get a copy. This time select the top bone and hit S to scale it. Drag it till it looks about the length of the it's twin, then hit R to rotate it in place. By using the hotkeys N to move, S to scale, and R to rotate, you rotate the whole chain instead of just the individual bone. Rename to Left. Assign Cp's.
75. Now we're onto the core. Everyone has different ways of rigging their cores. I'll tell you my current method, but by the time you read this I'll probably have changed.
So there are geometry bones that cp's attach to, and rigging bones that control how things work. The null at belly button height is my "Core", the parent of all bones, if I want to move my character around that's what I move ( some people use the model bone for this.) Coming down from this is the pelvis, it points down because it makes it easy to shake your booty (with an up pointing pelvis you have to counter animate the upper body if you want to shake your booty.) The turquoise bone coming up out of the pelvis is a rigging bone ("pelvis up"), since it's inside of it's parent it will move and rotate exactly like it's parent, but it's pointing up, which will help me to make the green cp's be a good mix between the pelvis and rib cage. Green is the start of the upper body chain, pretty straight forward, stomach(lumbar), rib cage(thoratic), neck( cervical), and head(skull). The pink bone is a rig bone and will control the chest (it will go in the exact same space as the thoratic bone, but I will move it there after I have constrained to it.) See my eyeball tutorial to understand the eyeball bones.
76. So here's the hierarchy. The leg chains have been dragged onto the pelvis bone, becoming children. The arm bones are now children of the thoratic bone. If you hit 9 or 0 while in bones mode the model is colored according to which bones the cp's are attached to. Check if there are any black spots, it means those cp's didn't get attached. There are now nulls outside of the main hierarchy also, these will be IK controls. You'll see I've added numbers in front of names as well. I number so that when I am animating the more important things will be near the top of the timeline so I can always find them. If I didn't number A:M arranges the timeline alphabetically. First I will want to deal with body placement so feet and core. Then I'll deal with the torso, next the arms, then I might deal with fiddly stuff like placement of knees and where he looks, and finally are fingers.
77. Time to rig. RIGHT CLICK choose New->Pose->On/Off. This opens a relationship window. When you right click on a bone you can choose a New Constraint. Constraints are extra instructions you give to bones. So constraints I apply are: Tibia IK to Foot Null
Heel Orient like Foot Null
Femur Aim At Thigh Target (child of foot null)
Lumbar Orient Like Pelvis UP (but only 40%, if you open the constraint in the PWS you can change the percentage)
select something else and then reselect Lumbar Aim At Chest
Lumbar roll like Chest (40%)
Thoratic orient like Chest
Neck aim at Head
Skull orient like Head
All the eye constraints (see the Eye Tutorial)
And that's the basic rig, click on the pose 1 name in the pose slider window (Opened from the View in the file menu bar) hit F2 and rename it Rig.
78. From the model window, RIGHT CLICK choose New->Pose- >On/Off. Switch to top view. Make these constraints:
Ulna IK to Hand null
Palm orient like Hand
Now open these constraints in the PWS. set Enforcement to 100% when the pose is on, turn the pose off and set Enforcement to 0%. Click the pose on and off to make sure that worked. Now Click on the Ulna bone in the window, and while the pose is On hit J, do the same with the Palm bone. This should make the ulna and palm disappear when the hand is working in IK. Rename the pose IK Right Hand. Close the window and do the same with the other hand.
79. Make a new on/off pose, use J to hide all the fingers, the thigh targets, and the eye targets (not the Look Null, but it's children). Close the window, in the modeling window, hide all the unnecessary bones. Click on the little triangle next to the models name. This opens up the properties for the model, near the bottom is "User Properties", in here are your poses. They're probably set to "not set" click the not set and set them to what you want their default to be (you probably want your rig to be on by default, and extra stuff hidden, maybe IK off). Also if you mess up a pose and want to delete it, here is where you do it by right clicking it's name.
80. Double Click Actions in the PWS. Grab the core Null and drag it around. Hopefully everything is working, make sure all your poses are turned on. In this image one of the cp's hadn't gotten assigned to any bone, so doesn't move with the correct bone. Get help on the forums if something's not working right. Your ready to animate.
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