In this video I'm going to kick off animation by showing you how we can make a skeleton for a low poly game character. [MUSIC] Well, I have a pretty nice character here. It can't really do anything. It can't pose, it can't move. I certainly can't animate it because for me to be able to move all these individual pieces just physically by hand would be really onerous, it would take me a lot of time. Fortunately, there's a whole system that we have of skeletons, skinning, and rigging that we can use to make animations for our characters. So as opposed to when we did pixel art and we were drawing into each individual frame, here we're actually manipulating the mesh to create shapes and poses that we need to create our animations. The first thing we need to do is work out the overall scale of our character. Before I do any rigging, I always want to make sure that again, my two former history is empty, my transforms are all frozen, and then I want to think about the scale that this is going to be at. Now previously, we've gone into our settings and preferences, we've set the overall scale to something like meters but we actually want to work this one in centimeters. This is because I'm going to be using the Maya HIK system which is a built in rigging system designed for cleaning up motion capture. That's actually going to make building a humanoid rig really quick for us. It's a nice fully functional rig for our human beings that's going to go a lot faster and actually can be adapted for four-legged animals as well. But I'm going to leave it on centimeters and save this thing. And then now I have to think about, how many centimeters tall should this figure be? I can't do it in meters, normally I would do 1.6 meters for an average woman. But because it's in centimeters, I'm going to create a queue and I'm going to give it a height sort of scale of 160 cm which is about 1.6 m and give it some dimension and depth and width as well. Before I hit the pivot down to the bottom and then set this whole object on the floor of my scene. Pile up into my front view. And if we click on our Annie character we can scale her up all along the grid until her head just about hits that height. So we have our character, she is scaled up, let's freeze the transforms. So now this is the default scale which will work very well with the HIK. But if my whole scene feels a little small, in terms of the scale at the grid, maybe I want to use the grid to help me out. So I can right-click the grid in my viewport here. Go into grid options and just increase everything by about a hundred. So instead of 12 it's 1200 and instead of five it's 50 or I'm increasing it by 10, I should say. Here we have our character fully modeled but we can't actually animate that until we create a structure or a rig for it to be animated around. And in this case, we're going to have to build a skeleton. Up in the rigging tab, we can find the human IK menu and click the generate skeleton button to make a starter skeleton. By clicking this little locator down at the center of the character, we can scale it down until it feels like the heads and shoulders line up properly. We're going to move around a lot of these bones in a second, but we want to start by giving ourselves a nice clean skeleton. I don't need a middle or pinky finger because I'm just going to be using an index and ring finger. Because, remember, we made it a little man instead for full hands. And then we're going to go about the process of adjusting the skeleton until it fits our character. Once we have a scale that we like, we can start moving these individual joints until they get into the right spots. We're thinking about these joints as the places where the character rotates. So this neck joint, for instance, needs to be placed where the neck would rotate. This head joint needs to be placed where the head would rotate on top of the neck. So we see here that as we move a lower joint, it'll move the upper one. The joints are connected by these little triangular things called bones. And we can see that it almost points like an arrow to the thing that it moves. So if we take this little shoulder joint, representing the clavicle and we move it into position, where it would be realistically on a human. So close up to the chest and rotating backwards it'll move everything with it. Any of these references or resources I'm thinking about where it would be on a human being. So I want the shoulder to rotate a little higher up thinking about in terms of the mass of the shoulder where it would rotate from. But I still want a nice straight line between the elbow and the wrist. Of course, between the shoulder joint, the elbow joint, and the wrist joint, the elbow should be right down in the middle. Then I move it in the red or x axis, making sure I have my local transforms turned on. And I just sort of try to rotate it in position at the arm level. While I can move these joints into position, I try to rotate them if at all possible. Well, the rig control system, we're going to be using for this, we'll fix a lot of joint orientation problems. I want to make sure as much as possible that I rotated joint into place rather than move it if at all possible. It's just going to work better for our rig. I'm using a pretty simple rig for this. I'm using this pre-made one from the human IK system in Maya to speed things up. But if I'm making a more complicated character, going for more advanced rigging which you might be interested in, I'm going to be making most of this rig by hand from the existing joint tools. For this one, however, some of the built-in stuff will speed up our time and produce pretty good results. So just taking these joints one by one and I'm rotating them, and as I mentioned before moving them exclusively around the x axis. You'll notice the x axis points down and so I move wherever I absolutely need to. But for the most part I'm rotating and moving solely on the x axis. So I'm trying to put these joints where I see edges. I'm thinking about where something needs to rotate from. On these fingers, they're generally curling inward and not up. So I place them towards the top of the finger, it gives me a little bit more control over their rotation. Something like this is often hard to do, and see exactly where the object is. So rotating around a lot, and getting a sense of in space, where that joint actually is, is really important. Same with this thumb. I want to get the top thumb joint somewhere in the origin and then I want to make sure that the curl that they built in for the thumb matches the curl that I've modified and built for my thumb when I model it in the first place. Our fingers and toes represent more than 50% of the actual joints in our bodies. So when we're rigging, we often spend a lot of our time just getting these fingers exactly right. Now, I'm thinking about where the hip will rotate from, so popping into more orthographic front view, I want to rotate it close to the top of the hip, and have my leg follow straight through into my ankle here. Then I rotate the ball of the foot into position. This is sort of representing the base of the toes, and I want to make sure it's positioned in a way that I can sort of crunch the foot, so that I can push up off of it and show a deformation along the foot. Because remember, the foot isn't a whole, flat thing, it has its own bend to it. When it comes to something like these knees, in the case of these knees I want to bring it forward without affecting everything else. So by holding W and my left mouse button I can go down to preserve children, which means that I can move one thing without moving all of the children underneath it, that's the rest of the joints. I only really want to do that for special occasions. Then I click the mirror geometry, then I click the mirror joints button which will mirror all of my changes are made on the right side of the object and put it over onto the other side. It's important for us to think right and left with this because we want to think about the character's right and left and not our own. Making a couple of adjustments to the spinal on the middle just trying to get to fit the curvature of the spine on the character. Before I go back and turn preserve children off because I don't want to leave it on in case I want to make any other adjustments. I want to make sure I move the whole skeleton with it. Turn it back on real quick just to get the ankle joint to rotate from the right spot. If I was doing a more professional or solid rig, I probably wouldn't use some of these techniques because I'm actually throwing off my joint orientation but that's a little outside the realm of this particular module. Just trying to introduce you to how these things work. Let's give it a quick name. This naming space is important for HIK's understanding where the character is. And we can see her skeleton definition. So now I have a skeleton but it's completely separated from my actual measure my model here. Nothing I do on this skeleton will affect in any way my model. In order to connect these two together, I need a system called a skin. So I start by selecting my skeleton, shift selecting my geometry, and I'm going to come up to, make sure I'm on the rigging tab, skin and go to bind skin. A really important note before we actually bind any skin, it's essential to make sure on our actual geometry here that our history is empty. If we don't have a fully clean history, by doing Delete History, either up here in the polymodeling tab or Edit:Delete by Type History, we can really mess some stuff up on our model. And we can spend hours trying to make a rig work or weird things keep happening, perks keep popping all over the place, we can't figure out why, it's because of this. So I have everything set. I make sure that I have my geo and my skeleton both selected and I'm going to do reset settings on this really quick. Generally these settings are by default pretty good. Geodesic voxel means it's actually going to voxelize our entire mesh to figure out what's closest to what joint and what should revolve or rotate with it. I'm going to leave all these other settings roughly the same, resolution should be fine and let's go ahead and find a skin. This creates a new system and we see this is why deleting the history is so important. On our actual geometry, it includes two new inputs, skin cluster and tweak. What that means is this is why we do this after we do UVs, after we do all the modelling. Because it's actually part of our deformer history the way that the skeleton here now if, I rotate parts of the skeleton, can actually bend parts of our model. So now our last step in preparing this skeleton is to take a look at how it's going to work with our HIK system. If you look over in the window here, we can see a little yellow exclamation mark. This indicates that there is an error or an issue with our skeleton. If we hover over it, we can see it says that the arms are not lined up. H i k wants everything to be in a T-pose. In fact, most riggers prefer their models to be in T-poses, but modelers like to model in A-poses. So often you'll model in a pose and then adjust it to be a T-pose later. So before we can do any the next steps and working out are skinning for our system and perfecting things, let's pop into our front orthographic view. And we'll rotate the clavicle to be straight and then rotate the arm until it lines up. I'm using the grid here to help me make sure things are lined up perpendicular to the axis. We can see all of those limbs go from yellow to green when that's working out. I do the same thing for the other side. Perfection isn't essential here, I'm just trying to get the general sense of how it should look on the left and right. Enough that this understands it's a T-pose. My validation is correct and now it's time to go through this model and fix up some of the skinning, edit in a couple of places, and make it work a little bit better for us for animations. [MUSIC]
