IntroductionWelcome| 00:04 | Hi! I am Chris Reilly.
| | 00:05 | Welcome to Game Character Creation in Maya.
| | 00:07 | In this course I will show you how to
use Maya's modeling and animation tools to
| | 00:11 | build the character for use in
the video game engine called Unity.
| | 00:14 | First, I will show you how
to model a low-poly character.
| | 00:18 | Then we will explore UV mapping and texturing.
| | 00:21 | Next, I will walk you through rigging
and preparing a character for animation.
| | 00:24 | We will look at importing
your game character into Unity.
| | 00:28 | Finally, we'll see how to make your
character interactive with scripting.
| | 00:31 | I am excited to show you the tips
and techniques you'll need to start
| | 00:34 | creating game characters.
| | 00:36 | Let's get started with Game
Character Creation in Maya.
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| What you need to know before watching this course| 00:00 | Okay, let's talk about what you need
to know before watching this course.
| | 00:03 | First of all, the techniques we use
in this course aren't specific to the
| | 00:07 | versions of software that we use.
| | 00:08 | So I will be using Maya 2011,
Photoshop CS5, and Unity 3.
| | 00:13 | But the techniques we cover should work in
other versions of those software packages.
| | 00:18 | You need to have intermediate to
advanced Maya skills to use the techniques
| | 00:22 | covered in this course, so you
should know things like polygon modeling,
| | 00:25 | texturing, and rigging and animation.
| | 00:28 | You should also have basic to
intermediate digital image editingskills in
| | 00:32 | Photoshop or an
equivalent image editing program.
| | 00:36 | Experience with the Unity game
engine is a plus, but it's not required.
| | 00:39 | We will cover a little bit of the basic
interface of Unity plus some techniques
| | 00:44 | used in importing game
characters and animating through scripts.
| | 00:48 | Keep in mind though that Unity is a
very complex program and there is a lot of
| | 00:51 | stuff that we won't have
time to cover in this course.
| | 00:54 | If you don't have that much experience
with Maya, check out some of the other
| | 00:57 | Maya courses on lynda.com.
| | 00:59 | These are a few I would recommend.
| | 01:00 | The Maya Essential Training courses, Maya 2011:
| | 01:04 | Modeling a Character, and
Character Animation Fundamentals with Maya.
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| Understanding game asset creation| 00:00 | Let's take an overview of game asset creation.
| | 00:03 | So let's think about all the
things that make up a video game.
| | 00:06 | Well, we've got sounds, images or
textures, 3D models for characters or props,
| | 00:12 | and scripts that can control interaction.
| | 00:15 | All of these things are
known as game assets generally.
| | 00:19 | Now you might have heard
this term a game engine.
| | 00:21 | Well what is a game engine?
| | 00:23 | A game engine is a software that
combines input from the user with other assets
| | 00:28 | like scripts and sounds to create real-
time renderings which basically lead to
| | 00:32 | your gameplay and fun video games
are all about real-time rendering.
| | 00:37 | If you've ever tried to play a video
game on a slow computer you might know
| | 00:40 | what I am talking about.
| | 00:41 | Video games that are responsive to
user input, even games that are still
| | 00:44 | difficult or challenging, are much
more engaging than video games that are
| | 00:47 | slow or unresponsive.
| | 00:49 | Now in order for a computer that's
rendering a video game to be responsive to
| | 00:53 | user input, the game assets
have to be rendered quickly.
| | 00:57 | This means they must be
optimized for low memory usage.
| | 01:00 | So image resolutions for textures
have to be relatively low. Also 3D models
| | 01:04 | can't be too complex.
| | 01:05 | So if you have experience creating
models in Maya for still renders, for
| | 01:09 | example, you might be used to working
with higher resolutions and higher poly
| | 01:12 | counts in your models. That's okay.
| | 01:14 | We will go over some specific
techniques to prepare a character model asset for
| | 01:18 | real-time rendering in the next few chapters.
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| Using the exercise files| 00:00 | If you're a premium member of the
lynda.com Online Training Library or if you're
| | 00:04 | watching this tutorial on a DVD-ROM you
have access to the exercise files used
| | 00:08 | throughout this title.
| | 00:10 | The exercise files for this course are
arranged into chapter folders with Maya
| | 00:15 | scene files for each chapter.
| | 00:17 | Make sure you watch the setting up
Scene folders video in the next chapter for
| | 00:21 | instructions on how to copy your
project files into your Maya and Unity project
| | 00:26 | folders to make it easier to
import between Maya and Unity.
| | 00:29 | If you are a monthly subscriber or
annual subscriber to lynda.com, you don't
| | 00:34 | have access to the exercise files,
but you can follow along from scratch
| | 00:37 | with your own assets.
| | 00:39 | Let's get started.
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1. Overview of Maya Modeling ToolsSetting up scene folders (Maya and Unity)| 00:00 | So as a first up, we will set up new
projects both in Unity and Maya and this
| | 00:04 | will create one central location where
all of our game asset files will live and
| | 00:08 | it's going to make it really easy to
work back and forth between Unity and Maya.
| | 00:12 | So in Unity, we are going to go to
the File menu and select New Project.
| | 00:17 | I will set the Project
Directory just to the Desktop.
| | 00:22 | You can save this to wherever you like.
And I will call this LyndaUnityProject.
| | 00:31 | Again, you can title it however you want.
| | 00:34 | You'll have the option here
to import the following packages.
| | 00:37 | So this will let you import lots of
pre-made assets into your Unity program files.
| | 00:42 | At this point we don't need to worry about this.
| | 00:43 | We will come back to this in later chapters.
| | 00:45 | So I can just come down here and click
Create Project and I don't what to save
| | 00:49 | this AngryBots default scene that
comes up when you first open Unity.
| | 00:56 | So let's take a look at the Finder.
| | 00:58 | So I see my LyndaUnityProject folder here.
| | 01:00 | If I go into that folder I will see
that Unity has automatically created this
| | 01:05 | folder hierarchy for me.
| | 01:07 | I see three folders here.
| | 01:08 | I have Assets and that's going
to hold all of my game assets.
| | 01:13 | So it's going to hold all of the
sounds, all the images, all the 3D models,
| | 01:16 | every file that I am going to be using
in my Unity projects is going to reside
| | 01:20 | in Assets, and I can make subfolders
of that Assets folders if I need to.
| | 01:24 | Library and Temp are both going to
hold backend files that Unity uses as
| | 01:29 | its imports and exports files,
automatically as it compresses images things like that.
| | 01:34 | Library and Temp, you should never
have to mess with and you should never
| | 01:37 | delete those folders.
| | 01:39 | So now that our Unity project is set up,
let's switch to Maya and we will create
| | 01:45 | a new project in Maya that's going
to live inside of our Unity project.
| | 01:50 | So in Maya I am going to click the
File menu, go down to Project, and select
| | 01:55 | New, and my project name, I am just
going to title this Maya-3DModels.
| | 01:59 | Again, you can title this however you like.
| | 02:06 | The Location I am going to set inside of my
UnityProject folder, inside the Assets folder.
| | 02:15 | Maya is going to give us some options
for all the different folders that are
| | 02:23 | going to hold things like textures and
animations, all of the stuff that goes
| | 02:27 | along with your Maya Project.
| | 02:29 | For those I am just going to click Use
Defaults and Maya is just going to get up
| | 02:33 | the default folder names for all those files.
| | 02:37 | So I will click Accept and back to Finder.
| | 02:41 | If I look in my Assets folder now, I
should this Maya project folder with all of
| | 02:47 | my Maya folder hierarchy in there too.
| | 02:53 | Now if we go back to Unity, we should
see in the Project panel here our Maya
| | 02:59 | project folder which is under our Assets.
| | 03:03 | So setting up the folders in this way is
going to let Unity automatically import
| | 03:07 | any changes to our Maya project and
that way we don't have to worry about
| | 03:11 | importing and exporting manually.
| | 03:14 | So as a final step let's go back to
Finder and we will copy in our exercise files.
| | 03:21 | So I am going to take images and
sourceimages, just copy those into my
| | 03:32 | Maya project folder.
| | 03:33 | It's going to ask me if I want to replace the
existing folders and I do want to replace them.
| | 03:42 | Then all the rest of my files I am
going to copy to the scenes folder.
| | 03:50 | So now we have all of our project
folder hierarchy set up and this is going to
| | 03:54 | make it really easy to work back
and forth between Maya and Unity.
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| Optimizing geometry| 00:00 | During a modeling process in Maya it's
important to be aware of the number of
| | 00:03 | triangular faces on your character model's mesh.
| | 00:06 | This number is generally referred to as
the polygon count or poly count for short.
| | 00:11 | You want to make sure your
poly count isn't too high.
| | 00:13 | If it is too high, your game may
render sluggishly or not at all.
| | 00:17 | It could actually even crash due to
that extra memory it's going to take to
| | 00:20 | render out a high poly character.
| | 00:22 | So in Maya we can get some feedback
about the poly count of your geometry by
| | 00:28 | accessing the heads-up display.
| | 00:30 | So in Maya I am just going to click
Display > Heads Up Display > Poly Count and
| | 00:36 | I can see here in the upper left of my
viewport I will get some rows and columns
| | 00:39 | with information about the poly
count and geometry in my scene.
| | 00:42 | So I have Verts, which is short for
Vertices, and Edges, Faces, Tris, which is
| | 00:48 | short for Triangles, and U and V coordinates.
| | 00:50 | So really Triangles is the number that
you want to be paying the most attention to.
| | 00:55 | So this column is going to show us the
totals for the scene. The middle column
| | 01:00 | will show us totals for what we have selected.
| | 01:02 | So let's go down and select this sphere
here. So I can see I have 760 triangles
| | 01:06 | in this sphere and 80 in the cylinder.
| | 01:10 | Then the far right column will show me counts
for individual components that I have selected.
| | 01:15 | So if I hold down right-mouse button
and select Face component mode, I can see
| | 01:20 | as I go to Shift+Select these faces I
will get counts for just those components
| | 01:24 | that I have selected.
| | 01:26 | So how do I know if my
character's poly count is too high?
| | 01:28 | Well, the answer is, it depends.
| | 01:30 | It depends on two major factors.
| | 01:33 | The first is the platform on
which your game will be running.
| | 01:37 | So a platform could be something like
an iPhone or an Android smart phone.
| | 01:42 | Another platform could be a desktop computer.
| | 01:45 | Now the poly count requirements are
going to be much lower for an iPhone or
| | 01:50 | smart phone since the processor and
the memory is much more restrictive than
| | 01:54 | something a desktop computer.
| | 01:55 | So there's definitely a range that depends
on what platform your game will be running on.
| | 02:00 | Another factor that's going to affect
your target poly count is going to be sort
| | 02:04 | of the structure of your gameplay.
| | 02:06 | So for example if your character will
be appearing on screen with lots of other
| | 02:10 | characters at the same time, your poly
count restrictions will be tighter versus
| | 02:15 | a game where your character
is the only thing on screen.
| | 02:18 | So it depends both on the platform
and on the structure of your gameplay.
| | 02:22 | Generally speaking, for something like
a smart phone platform your poly count
| | 02:27 | might be somewhere between 300 to 1500 polygons.
| | 02:30 | On the other hand, a poly count for a
desktop platform might be something more
| | 02:35 | like 1,000 maybe even up to 10,000 polygons.
| | 02:39 | So the important thing to note is to
just have a good idea of the range that
| | 02:43 | you want to end up in.
| | 02:44 | 10 or 20 polygons more or less isn't
really going to make or break your game,
| | 02:47 | but if you're shooting for 1,500
polygons and you end up having 10,000, that's
| | 02:52 | probably going to be problem.
| | 02:54 | Another thing to be aware of is that
poly count isn't the only thing that can
| | 02:58 | affect the rendering
resources that a character will use.
| | 03:01 | Other things like UV map scenes and hard
edges can also effectively increase the
| | 03:05 | poly count that actually gets
rendered by the game engine.
| | 03:08 | But keeping track of the number of
triangles is going to give you a pretty good
| | 03:11 | baseline for what your
actual poly count will be.
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| Using symmetry| 00:00 | Taking advantage of Maya's symmetry tools
can really speed up your modeling process.
| | 00:04 | Parts of the character that are identical,
the arms or legs for instance, really
| | 00:08 | only need to be modeled once, then
mirrored across their axis of symmetry.
| | 00:11 | Here's one way to do that.
| | 00:13 | I have selected this mesh half that
I have modeled already and under the
| | 00:16 | Polygons menu, I can go to Mesh
> Mirror Geometry with options.
| | 00:23 | Now since we've already modeled
this half of the mesh in the positive X
| | 00:27 | quadrant, we want to mirror it into
negative X. So our Mirror Direction is
| | 00:31 | negative X. We also want to merge the
two meshes together and merge the vertices
| | 00:37 | together to form one complete mesh.
| | 00:39 | So I will click Mirror and I can see I
have got my complete mirrored mesh here.
| | 00:44 | So I can make further edits
to this mesh if I want to.
| | 00:47 | Let's go in to Vertex mode.
| | 00:48 | I am just holding down my right-mouse
button here and select Vertex and let's
| | 00:53 | just make some edits to the hand here.
| | 00:55 | So I am going to select all those
vertices on a hand and the wrist, switch to my
| | 01:00 | Move tool, and I can move
those around as I want to.
| | 01:04 | Now you'll notice the changes
are only happening on one side.
| | 01:07 | So the mesh isn't symmetrical anymore.
| | 01:10 | If I wanted to, I could come over here,
I could try to make those same edits.
| | 01:13 | Well, that's really tedious.
| | 01:15 | I would not recommend trying to model this way.
| | 01:17 | I am just hitting Ctrl+Z here or Command+Z
on the Mac to undo the changes I just made.
| | 01:23 | One technique you can use to help you
with symmetrical modeling can be found
| | 01:28 | under the tool settings,
under these Reflection Settings.
| | 01:31 | So I have got the Move tool selected
right now and if I select Reflection
| | 01:36 | we will notice what happens.
| | 01:37 | Here in the viewport the vertices that I
have selected on the right hand are now
| | 01:42 | mirrored with a selection on the left hand.
| | 01:44 | So my selection of vertices is
mirrored over the X axis and as I've make
| | 01:50 | adjustments to those, those changes
are going to update across the X axis.
| | 01:56 | So that can help me with symmetrical modeling.
| | 01:58 | Now one of the problems with this
technique is that it doesn't work for every tool.
| | 02:03 | So let's say that I wanted to do
something like add an edge loop.
| | 02:07 | So if I go to Edit Mesh > Insert Edge Loop tool.
| | 02:11 | Let's just pick a place here.
| | 02:13 | Let's add an edge loop on the body here.
| | 02:16 | Well, okay, it's updated on
the right side, but not the left.
| | 02:20 | So that's going to be a problem.
| | 02:21 | Again, I really want to avoid
trying to manually make those changes on
| | 02:24 | both sides of the model. symmetrical
| | 02:26 | So I will show you another technique
that's a little bit more robust and can
| | 02:29 | take care of some of these
changes when modeling symmetrically.
| | 02:33 | So I am going to reopen
this scene without saving.
| | 02:41 | So this other technique uses
the Duplicate Special command.
| | 02:44 | So if I go to the Edit menu I
can Duplicate Special with options.
| | 02:50 | So I want to create a geometry type
that's in instance of this original
| | 02:54 | half that I have and I want to mirror that
geometry again into the negative X quadrant.
| | 03:01 | So I will set the Scale property to
-1 in the X. So these scaling boxes here
| | 03:06 | correspond to X, Y, Z.
| | 03:08 | So I will mirror it to negative X. So
I'll Duplicate Special and now what I have
| | 03:14 | is an instance of this original half
of the mesh that's mirrored into the
| | 03:18 | negative X quadrant and as I go to make
changes here, again I will just more some
| | 03:23 | of these vertices and then in my
tool settings I will turn Reflection off
| | 03:29 | because I don't need it anymore.
| | 03:31 | And you can see even though I have
turned Reflection off these vertices are
| | 03:34 | still selected symmetrically.
| | 03:37 | As I make changes with the Move tool
it's going to update automatically, because
| | 03:41 | the side is an instance of the
original side and it's even going to work for
| | 03:46 | changes like edge loops.
| | 03:48 | So if I insert an edge loop, that's
going to be updated over the X axis as well.
| | 03:55 | So that's a little more robust way
of working symmetrically with the
| | 03:59 | Duplicate Special command.
| | 04:01 | So modeling symmetrically can save
your lots of time during your modeling
| | 04:03 | process and I would really recommend to
model symmetrically as much as you can.
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| Extruding geometry| 00:00 | One of the most versatile techniques
for editing polygonal geometry in Maya is
| | 00:03 | the Extrude command.
| | 00:05 | Extrude allows you to move, scale, or
rotate polygonal components like faces,
| | 00:09 | vertices, or edges while
automatically creating new geometry on the fly.
| | 00:13 | Using Extrude makes it easy to flesh
out a rough version of your geometry, then
| | 00:17 | go back later and build in additional details.
| | 00:19 | So let's take a look at this cube shape here.
| | 00:21 | Maybe this is a shape of a torso and
we want to start to create some arms.
| | 00:26 | So I am just going to click my right-mouse
button here, switch to Face component mode.
| | 00:29 | I will just select one of
these faces on the side here.
| | 00:32 | So maybe I want to move this out to
start forming the upper arm of the character.
| | 00:36 | So I am going to switch to the Move tool.
| | 00:40 | When I first select this face, if I
try to move it, you can see you get some
| | 00:43 | weird deformation there.
| | 00:45 | So I am just going to undo that.
| | 00:48 | We want to actually use the Extrude command.
| | 00:50 | So I am going to go up
here to Edit Mesh > Extrude.
| | 00:53 | Now, when we go to drag this face
out from the cube, Maya is going to
| | 00:57 | automatically build in these faces
along the side so that face can
| | 01:01 | extrude forward away from
the main portion of the torso.
| | 01:05 | When we first do the Extrude command,
you will get the Show Manipulator tool
| | 01:08 | here and this is going to allow you to
rotate or scale or move the face or the
| | 01:13 | polygon component that you are extruding.
| | 01:15 | So we can grab these little cones
here and move the extrusion around.
| | 01:21 | We can click the little cube handles
here to scale the extrusion and we can
| | 01:27 | click this rotate handle here to bring
up the Rotation tool and we can rotate
| | 01:34 | the extrusion as well.
| | 01:36 | When you first do an extrusion, the
Show Manipulator tool will be oriented in
| | 01:41 | local coordinates to the
component you are extruding.
| | 01:44 | So it's not going to quite
match up with the world coordinates.
| | 01:47 | As you can see the little guy down here.
It's going to be oriented to the face
| | 01:52 | of the vertex that you are extruding.
| | 01:53 | We can switch back and forth between
world and local coordinates, just by
| | 01:57 | clicking this little coordinate handle
here, and now are oriented to the world
| | 02:02 | coordinates and we can move
relative to the origin on our grid.
| | 02:06 | So that's a simple extrusion.
| | 02:08 | Let's do a couple of more complicated ones.
| | 02:11 | Let's say on the sphere here maybe we
want to have some shapes that are going
| | 02:16 | to be legs coming off of this sphere.
| | 02:19 | So if we wanted to extrude all four
of these faces at once, I can just
| | 02:22 | Shift+Select all four,
go to Edit Mesh and Extrude.
| | 02:29 | So now when we extrude these out away
from the sphere, they will all extrude
| | 02:33 | as individual legs.
| | 02:35 | But if we wanted to extrude all four as
one extrusion, let's go ahead and undo that.
| | 02:44 | I can just activate this
Keep Faces Together option.
| | 02:47 | So if I select Keep Faces Together and
then do an extrusion, those faces will
| | 02:54 | extrude as one component.
| | 03:01 | We can also use a curve as an extrusion path.
| | 03:06 | So I will select this curve.
| | 03:07 | I am just holding down my right-mouse
button here and then I can also select this face.
| | 03:16 | So now if I go to Extrude with
options, I just need to make sure that this
| | 03:22 | Use selected curve for extrusion option is
checked, and let's go ahead and apply that.
| | 03:27 | Well, you can see it sort of went along
the curve, but what's happening is this
| | 03:32 | Division setting is set to 1.
| | 03:33 | So it's only doing one division from
the original face to the extruded face.
| | 03:38 | Let's go ahead and undo our extrusion.
| | 03:41 | Let's increase that Division.
| | 03:42 | Let's maybe say 10 and see what happens. Okay.
| | 03:47 | So now that extrusion is going to
follow more closely the NURBS curve we
| | 03:50 | selected, and the more divisions we
have, the closer it's going to follow.
| | 03:53 | So maybe this is a piece of hair or
something like that in our character and we
| | 03:58 | could adjust that even a little
bit more with this Taper command.
| | 04:01 | So if we scale this down a little bit,
the extrusion will taper downwards as it
| | 04:08 | goes towards the end of the curve.
| | 04:09 | So take some time to play
with the Extrude commands.
| | 04:11 | These are really great techniques for
quick low poly modeling and you'd be
| | 04:15 | surprised how much you can flesh out a
model just with a few simple extrusions.
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| Sculpting geometry| 00:00 | Maya Sculpting tools are convenient
for creating smooth organic shapes while
| | 00:04 | minimizing tedious
selection of polygon components.
| | 00:07 | Two techniques in Maya for sculpting
polygonal geometry are Soft Selection and
| | 00:11 | the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 00:13 | Soft Selection allows a tool to affect
not only the polygon components that are
| | 00:17 | selected, but also adjacent
components within a surrounding area.
| | 00:21 | Let's try and example on
this sphere using Soft Select.
| | 00:25 | So right now I have two vertices
selected on this sphere and I'm using my Move
| | 00:29 | tool, so if I click and drag these out
to move those vertices around you can
| | 00:33 | see how sharp the division is
between the vertices I have selected and the
| | 00:38 | neighboring vertices.
| | 00:39 | So I'm just going to hit Ctrl+Z to undo that.
| | 00:42 | So let's try that move again using Soft Select.
| | 00:45 | So in my tool settings here for the
Move tool I'll check the Soft Select box to
| | 00:50 | turn on Soft Select and you
can see how the display changes.
| | 00:54 | So if I click again to move those vertices
you can see how it's moving much differently.
| | 00:58 | So not only am I moving the vertices
that are selected, but I'm also moving
| | 01:03 | these surrounding vertices.
| | 01:05 | So let's pretend that the shape
is maybe the start of the head of a
| | 01:08 | character that we're going to model
and let's say that I want to try to form
| | 01:12 | some eye sockets here.
| | 01:13 | Right now my Soft Select is kind of
moving too many vertices at once, so let me
| | 01:17 | just undo those moves.
| | 01:19 | What I can do over here in Soft Select
is decrease this Falloff radius. Maybe
| | 01:23 | I'll give this a two.
| | 01:24 | That looks okay for maybe
the start of an eye socket.
| | 01:33 | So when you have Soft Select activated
you'll see visually the vertices that
| | 01:37 | are being affected.
| | 01:39 | So the yellow vertices are the
ones that are actually selected.
| | 01:42 | The red ones are being partially
selected by Soft Select and black ones aren't
| | 01:47 | going to move at all.
| | 01:48 | So you can affect how many vertices
are selected with the Falloff radius and
| | 01:53 | also the Falloff curve.
| | 01:54 | I'd recommend playing around with some
these different curve presets just to
| | 01:57 | see how those behave.
| | 01:59 | Now the Sculpt Geometry tool allows you
to very quickly modify geometry using a
| | 02:03 | really intuitive painting interface.
| | 02:04 | So let's get to the Sculpt Geometry tool.
| | 02:07 | It's under the Mesh menu, Sculpt Geometry
tool, so let's bring that up with options.
| | 02:13 | So now, as I mouse over my sphere here
I'm going to get this brush interface.
| | 02:19 | So I want to select my whole sphere, so I
just did a right mouse click and hit Select.
| | 02:23 | So the Sculpt Geometry tool allows you
to very quickly modify geometry using
| | 02:27 | a painting interface.
| | 02:29 | So let's go ahead and select an operation here.
| | 02:32 | I want to pull and let's
see what happens here. Ah, okay.
| | 02:37 | So as I click with the left mouse
button, the Sculpt Geometry tool is going to
| | 02:44 | pull those faces out from the center
and that's probably a little bit more
| | 02:50 | than I want, so I'll switch to the Erase
operation and just brush that back to where we started.
| | 03:00 | So if I wanted to start to flesh out
the nose area right here I might switch
| | 03:03 | back to pull and I would want to
select a smaller area with my brush, so I
| | 03:09 | could hold down the B key and just
left-mouse-click and drag and that's going
| | 03:16 | to decrease my radius.
| | 03:17 | That's looking a little better.
| | 03:31 | And as far as the nose goes, that's a
little bit wonky, so I could also try to
| | 03:36 | smooth that out a little bit with the
Smooth operation. And I would just keep
| | 03:49 | working on this until it looked right.
| | 03:51 | Again, I would recommend playing around
with these tools. They're a lot of fun,
| | 03:54 | they are very intuitive and it's a
great way to sculpt your geometry without
| | 03:58 | having to do a lot of
tedious selection in between.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing reference sketches| 00:00 | So, now I'll make some adjustments in
Maya that will help me to model in the
| | 00:03 | proper scale and proportion.
| | 00:04 | Proper scaling of your Maya model helps
smooth your workflow between Unity and
| | 00:09 | Maya, giving you a model that fits
with the rest of the assets in your Unity
| | 00:12 | project without needing manual adjustment.
| | 00:14 | Now, of course, once we get in to Unity,
we can certainly adjust the scaling as
| | 00:18 | we need to, but this is going to help
it fit automatically with other assets
| | 00:21 | that we might create for our game.
| | 00:23 | So the very first thing I am going to do in
Maya is to set the linear units to meters.
| | 00:28 | Now meters are the default system unit
in Unity, so modeling my Maya scene using
| | 00:32 | meters makes sense.
| | 00:34 | To set the units, I'll go to Window >
Settings/Preferences > Preferences >
| | 00:41 | Settings and I will set the
Working Units to meter. Then click Save.
| | 00:48 | I will also make some adjustments to my grid.
| | 00:52 | So under Display > Grid Options,
I will set the Length and Width to 5.
| | 01:01 | Grid lines every 1 unit, with 10 Subdivisions.
| | 01:06 | These settings will make the grid
match up a little bit more closely to the
| | 01:09 | proportions of our character, just
make it easier to work off the grid.
| | 01:13 | So I will click Apply and Close.
| | 01:16 | Now I will go ahead and add some
reference images of the character that we
| | 01:19 | are going to model, and this will just
give me a nice visual reference, as I
| | 01:22 | go through the stages of modeling
to work off of, so that I am not just
| | 01:25 | making it up as I go along.
| | 01:26 | So let's switch to Finder and in my
Maya Project folder, under sourceimages,
| | 01:34 | I have few different
reference images for Doug the Bug.
| | 01:39 | Now you'll notice under the Pixel
Dimensions here, all of these reference
| | 01:43 | images are the same size.
| | 01:45 | I have got open in Photoshop and we
just take a little bit closer look.
| | 01:50 | So each reference image is
proportioned at two to three, the Width versus the
| | 01:56 | Length, and that's going to make it
nice and easy for us to set up consistent
| | 01:59 | reference planes in Maya.
| | 02:01 | So I will switch back to Maya.
| | 02:04 | And I will go ahead and set up the
reference plane for the Front viewport, so I
| | 02:08 | am just going to switch to the Front viewport.
| | 02:10 | I just hit Spacebar there to switch
into my four-panel view and I will hit
| | 02:15 | Spacebar again with the
mouse over the Front panel.
| | 02:18 | So I am going to go ahead and create a
Polygon Primitive and I want a Plane and
| | 02:25 | I can just click and drag to create a
plane perpendicular to the Front viewport.
| | 02:33 | Now the important thing I want to
do here is this polyPlane INPUT,
| | 02:36 | I want to set the Width
to 2 and the Height to 3.
| | 02:41 | So remember each of our reference images
are scaled to be proportioned at 2 to 3.
| | 02:47 | So that will make sure that they fit
nicely on each reference plane and that
| | 02:51 | they are all scaled consistently.
| | 02:53 | The next step is to apply the
reference image as a texture to this plane.
| | 02:57 | So I am going to right mouse click
over my plane, select Assign New Material.
| | 03:03 | I will make a Lambert Shader and map the
shader's Color attribute to a File node.
| | 03:14 | Then point the Image Name to the
reference image for the front viewport.
| | 03:20 | And I am just going to click Open.
| | 03:23 | So now in my Front viewport, I will
switch to Shaded mode and Textured and if I
| | 03:30 | zoom in here I see I have my front
viewport image on the plane but it's getting
| | 03:34 | cut off and it looks like it's kind of
stretched out a little bit horizontally.
| | 03:38 | So one additional step
| | 03:39 | I need to take is to select
the plane, go up to Create UVs,
| | 03:44 | and I want to do a Planar Mapping with options.
| | 03:46 | I want to Fit the projection to the
Bounding box of the plane, and I want to
| | 03:53 | Project from the Z axis, so Z is the
perpendicular axis that's facing directly
| | 03:57 | towards the reference plane, and I
will just click Project and that should
| | 04:03 | nicely fit the reference image to the plane.
| | 04:06 | Okay, I will just right-click and
select that and we can move it around a bit
| | 04:12 | in the Channel Box.
| | 04:13 | I don't want to translate it in the X
direction and in the Y direction, I want
| | 04:20 | to make sure that the bottom
is lined up with the X axis.
| | 04:24 | So I should be able to set this to
1.5, because that's half of the overall
| | 04:29 | height of the image.
| | 04:30 | Okay, and I will switch back to
Perspective view and just turn on Shading and
| | 04:36 | Texturing and I will select, so I am
just right-clicking, and with my Move tool,
| | 04:42 | I will just move this back off of the grid.
| | 04:46 | So that when I am in Perspective Mode
working on my character in the center here,
| | 04:49 | the reference image isn't in the way.
| | 04:51 | So I am going to go ahead and create those
reference images the same exact way for each view.
| | 04:57 | So I will do one for the side, one
for the top, and there is actually one
| | 05:01 | for the back as well.
| | 05:02 | The only difference is going to be
when I go to create that Planar Mapping.
| | 05:08 | I will change the axis that I am
projecting from depending on which viewport I
| | 05:15 | am setting up the reference image for.
| | 05:18 | And when it's done, should
look something like this.
| | 05:23 | So you can see I have these reference
images sitting outside the grid and if I
| | 05:32 | hit Spacebar to switch to any of the
orthogonal views, they will be lined up
| | 05:37 | and that will make it really easy to have a
visual reference as I am modeling my character.
| | 05:41 | And of course, I can deviate from the
reference images as I need to, but again
| | 05:45 | it's a nice visual guideline.
| | 05:47 | It's going to help me to maintain the
correct scale and proportion of my model,
| | 05:51 | especially in relation to other
assets that will be in my game.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
2. Insect Character Creation: Modeling the BodyModeling the head and nose| 00:00 | Let's start off modeling our character,
Doug the bug, by looking at the face.
| | 00:04 | So we'll just look at the front of the
head here, so the eyes, nose, and mouth area.
| | 00:08 | You can see the overall shape of
the head is really close to a sphere.
| | 00:12 | So it really makes sense to start off
with a polygonal sphere primitive and
| | 00:15 | just work from there.
| | 00:17 | I'm going to switch to the Top
viewport here, go up to Create > Polygon
| | 00:24 | Primitives > Sphere, and just click-
and-drag a sphere more or less over
| | 00:29 | the reference image.
| | 00:31 | I'll switch to the Front view and I
just need to drag this up again to line up
| | 00:40 | with the reference image.
| | 00:42 | Now one thing I'll notice is that the
number of polygons here is pretty high
| | 00:47 | compared to what I'm going to need for the face.
| | 00:51 | So I can adjust the number of polygons
in my sphere by going to the Channel Box
| | 00:56 | and clicking on this polySphere1 input.
| | 00:59 | Right now these are both set to 20
Subdivisions on the Height and the Axis.
| | 01:04 | I'm going to change this to 12 Axis
Subdivisions and 8 Height Subdivisions.
| | 01:09 | So that's going to reduce the number of
polygons in our facial area, but still
| | 01:14 | give us enough to work with to
flesh out the important geometry.
| | 01:17 | Now since we're going to be using some
of those symmetry techniques we talked
| | 01:20 | about in an earlier chapter, I can
actually go ahead and just delete this
| | 01:24 | half of the sphere.
| | 01:25 | So I'm just going to switch to Face
component mode, just click-and-drag, and
| | 01:31 | delete that whole half of the sphere.
| | 01:34 | Also, from the Side viewport, I'm going to
delete the whole back of the sphere as well.
| | 01:40 | Since the back of the head has some
other details like the antenna and the
| | 01:43 | ears, we'll come back to that in a later
chapter and kind of give that some more attention.
| | 01:47 | So I'll delete all those, select my
quadrant of the sphere at this point, and
| | 01:53 | then I'll just kind of align
that a little bit more closely.
| | 01:55 | One thing I can do in the viewport is
to switch the Shading to X-Ray mode and
| | 02:01 | that will let me see both the geometry
and the reference image at the same time.
| | 02:04 | So that's really helpful.
| | 02:08 | I'll do the same thing in the Front viewport.
| | 02:10 | So if we look from the front, I can see
that the edge of the sphere is slightly
| | 02:20 | off from the Y axis.
| | 02:21 | Since we're going to be mirroring this
later on, we want to maintain a really
| | 02:25 | consistent axis of symmetry
that's right along that Y axis.
| | 02:28 | That's going to make mirroring the
two halves of the geometry much easier
| | 02:32 | later on down the line.
| | 02:33 | So what I can do at this point is just
hold down the X key and that's going to
| | 02:37 | snap to the grid lines.
| | 02:39 | So as I move this half of the sphere,
you can see it's snapping to each one of
| | 02:42 | those gridlines, and I'll just
snap it right to the Y axis gridline.
| | 02:46 | That'll make mirroring really easy later on.
| | 02:50 | Okay, so let's take a look at the nose.
| | 02:51 | So you can see the nose in the reference
image is kind of this inverted triangle shape.
| | 02:57 | What I would need to do to this
rectangular face here to flesh out the nose
| | 03:01 | is to actually split that face, so I
can get sort of a triangular shape for
| | 03:05 | the base of the nose.
| | 03:06 | Before I do that, I'm just going to
switch to Vertex mode, just move these down
| | 03:12 | a little bit to align
more closely with the mouth.
| | 03:17 | So I'll switch back to Face mode and
I'll split that face over the nose using
| | 03:22 | the Split Polygon tool.
| | 03:24 | So I'm going to Edit Mesh > Split
Polygon tool, and I will just click down here
| | 03:28 | at the base of the nose, and
up at the top. That looks good.
| | 03:32 | I hit Enter to finalize and split that face.
| | 03:36 | So I'm right-clicking to switch back to
Face mode and I can select that face and
| | 03:42 | extrude it to form the nose.
| | 03:44 | So it's going to be a lot easier to do
that from the Side view, so let's switch
| | 03:47 | to the Side view, just zoom-
in a little bit here. Okay.
| | 03:52 | So I'll extrude that face, and I'll
take it out, and I want to scale it down
| | 04:06 | to form the tip there.
| | 04:07 | I'm just going to click this local world
coordinate handle to switch to world coordinates.
| | 04:14 | That way, I can move it
relative to the world axes.
| | 04:17 | That looks pretty good.
| | 04:21 | Let's take a look in
Perspective view. Yeah, pretty good.
| | 04:33 | So one last step for the nose, we just
want to make sure that we delete that face.
| | 04:39 | Since the axis of symmetry is going to
run along the middle of the head, along
| | 04:43 | the middle of the nose, so we want to move
those edges also to line up with the Y axis.
| | 04:48 | So I'm selecting those three edges along
the nose, and I'm going to use the Move
| | 04:54 | tool to snap these right to that Y axis,
and I just want to make sure under my
| | 04:59 | tools settings that this Retain
component spacing is unchecked.
| | 05:07 | So I'll hold down X in the Front
viewport and just click and move that over, and
| | 05:12 | it's going to snap all
those edges right to the Y axis.
| | 05:16 | That's going to maintain our axis of symmetry.
| | 05:18 | I probably want to move that vertex over
to keep the nose nice and pointy. Okay.
| | 05:26 | So we've got the main shape of
the face and the nose fleshed out.
| | 05:30 | In the next couple of videos,
we'll tackle the eyes and the mouth.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating the mouth| 00:00 | In this video we will look at
making the mouth, which is really just a
| | 00:03 | simple extrusion inwards.
| | 00:05 | Now one thing I want to do in the side
view here is make a couple adjustments
| | 00:12 | to these edge loops.
| | 00:13 | So I want-- this one at the top looks
pretty good because it's kind of lined up
| | 00:16 | with that upper lip.
| | 00:17 | I want to get this bottom one lined up
with the lower lip and then have this one
| | 00:21 | I have got selected in between.
| | 00:23 | So I am just going to drag that up.
| | 00:29 | Drag that up just so it's kind of
horizontally aligned with the bottom of the lip there.
| | 00:36 | And then I can scale these with the
Scale tool but I want to scale out from the
| | 00:42 | back edge of the head.
| | 00:43 | So I can move that scaling point just
by holding down the D key and I want to
| | 00:49 | move it right so that it's
aligned with that back vertex.
| | 00:52 | So I will also hold down V to snap to vertices.
| | 00:56 | Just move that right back.
| | 00:57 | And just kind of scale it so that's going to
align sort of with the shape of the head there.
| | 01:06 | And same thing for this edge loop.
| | 01:07 | I am going to hold down D to move the
reference point and V to snap to vertex.
| | 01:14 | Scale that out, maybe come down a
little bit, and I will do the same thing
| | 01:24 | from the front view.
| | 01:28 | So aligning the edge loops like this is
going to give us a nice starting point
| | 01:32 | for when we do an extrusion for the mouth.
| | 01:34 | It's going to let us have sort of a
nice lip shape around the mouth and it will
| | 01:37 | make deformations easier once we
go to do animations on the mouth.
| | 01:44 | So I continue tweaking this until I
get the mouth lined up how I wanted.
| | 01:46 | So again I want this top edge loop to
be lined up more or less with the upper lip,
| | 01:49 | this bottom one with the lower lip,
and this middle one kind of in between
| | 01:54 | where the teeth would meet and that's
going to let me extrude inward to form
| | 01:58 | the mouth and form a nice little lip
shape that will make deformations a lot
| | 02:02 | easier down the road.
| | 02:03 | Okay, so then to form the mouth I
will switch to Face mode and I will
| | 02:07 | Shift+Select these four faces.
| | 02:11 | Under Edit Mesh I'll make sure to Keep
Faces Together is checked and then I will
| | 02:15 | Extrude and I just want to scale these
down a little bit, move them over, and I
| | 02:23 | will switch to the Perspective view
just to make sure that's looking okay.
| | 02:30 | So what we want to do here is kind of
drag this extrusion out a little bit.
| | 02:38 | So I will do this from the Side view
and I am going to click this little local
| | 02:42 | world coordinate handle to switch to
world coordinates and just kind of pull
| | 02:47 | this out a little bit.
| | 02:47 | So you can see as I am pulling this
out we are forming a little lip shape and
| | 02:50 | that's going to help to flush out
the upper and the lower lips there.
| | 02:53 | That looks pretty good.
| | 02:56 | I am going to extrude this again and
again switch to world coordinates and
| | 03:04 | we will just take this straight back.
| | 03:06 | So I will switch to the Move tool by
hitting W after I extrude those faces
| | 03:09 | backward and I will just hold down X to
get those just snap to grid and that way
| | 03:14 | we can align them all up.
| | 03:15 | We can see a little bit better from perspective.
| | 03:18 | So now that back of the mouth is nice
and flat and that's just going to make it
| | 03:21 | a little bit easier down the
road when we go to mirror it.
| | 03:27 | So kind of like we did with the nose.
| | 03:29 | I just want to go ahead and delete all
these interior faces that were formed by
| | 03:34 | extrusion and I will switch to Edge mode and I
can see in my Front viewport here very clearly.
| | 03:44 | I want to get all these edges lined
up with that axis of symmetry along
| | 03:47 | the y-axis, just like we did with the nose.
That's going to make mirroring easier later on.
| | 03:52 | So an easy way to select all of these
edges is just I am going to select this
| | 03:55 | one right below the nose, go down here,
Shift and double-click, and it's going to
| | 04:02 | grab all those edges in between.
| | 04:03 | Then I can just hold down X, Snap to
Grid, and snap it right to that y-axis.
| | 04:10 | That's looking good!
| | 04:11 | I could keep making adjustments to the
vertices to form the lip shape but for
| | 04:15 | time's sake let's just see my finished file.
| | 04:17 | So it should look something like this
and you can see especially the bottom
| | 04:20 | lip shape there is it's just looking a lot
more similar to what's in the reference image.
| | 04:24 | Okay, in the next video we
will look at making the eyes.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Crafting the eyes| 00:00 | Okay, so we've done some work and
we've got the nose and the mouth fleshed
| | 00:03 | out in the face here.
| | 00:04 | So let's take a crack at the eye.
| | 00:06 | Right now this is still a pretty
spherical shape, so I want to go ahead and form
| | 00:09 | an eye socket first.
| | 00:11 | Let me switch to the front view here.
| | 00:13 | So what I want to do to form the eye
socket is grab these four faces that kind
| | 00:18 | of sit right over the
eyeball in the reference image.
| | 00:21 | So I am just going to
switch to Face component mode.
| | 00:23 | I am holding down my right mouse button here.
| | 00:25 | I am just going to Shift+
Select these four faces.
| | 00:30 | I want to make sure under Edit Mesh
that Keep Faces Together is selected and
| | 00:36 | I'll just go ahead and extrude these four faces,
and I want to scale these down a little bit.
| | 00:42 | So I am just going to click the scale
handle here and scale it uniformly down.
| | 00:46 | That looks pretty good.
| | 00:47 | I'll switch back to the Perspective
view to see how it looks. Not bad.
| | 00:55 | And I will also push the extrusion back just
a little bit towards the center of the head.
| | 00:59 | So you can see what that's going to do
is start to form kind of the bridge of
| | 01:02 | the nose and part of the eyelid shape here.
| | 01:05 | Eventually, we'll end up deleting
these interfaces and that's going to form
| | 01:08 | the open eye socket.
| | 01:09 | Okay, I'll do one more extrude and if I
switch to the kind of back of the head
| | 01:18 | here. It's a little bit
easier to see what's happening.
| | 01:22 | So this time I want to extrude these
back up and push them back just a little
| | 01:28 | bit farther towards the back of the head.
| | 01:30 | Like I said, we can just delete these
and now we have an open eye socket and
| | 01:38 | we'll fill that in with an eyeball.
| | 01:41 | This shape here is going to
kind of flesh out the eyelid shape.
| | 01:47 | So I'll switch back to my front
view and give Doug an eyeball.
| | 01:56 | So for that I can just use the polygon sphere.
| | 01:58 | So I will go to Create > Polygon
Primitives > Sphere and just click-and-drag.
| | 02:04 | Now it can be a little misleading when
you're looking at the reference image,
| | 02:07 | because the eyeball in that reference
image is fairly small compared to what I
| | 02:12 | just drew here, but you've got to
realize though that the eyeball itself is
| | 02:15 | going to extend back into the head and
the visible part is kind of only a small
| | 02:20 | fraction of the actual eyeball itself.
| | 02:23 | So make sure that you draw it big enough
so that it's going to be able to rotate
| | 02:26 | around inside the eye socket.
| | 02:29 | Just like when we do the sphere for
the face originally we probably have too
| | 02:32 | much geometry here in this eyeball.
| | 02:34 | So I'm going to knock that down a little bit.
| | 02:36 | So with the eyeball selected I am just
going to click on this polySphere2 INPUT
| | 02:41 | and change those Axis and Height
Subdivisions to-- I think both should be good at 10.
| | 02:45 | That will give us enough to work with.
| | 02:51 | From there it's just a matter of
positioning based on the reference image, and
| | 03:11 | then we'll want to do a little bit of
adjustment to some of these vertices that
| | 03:16 | are forming sort of the eyelid shape.
| | 03:18 | So you can see here there is a
big gap in-between the eyelid and the
| | 03:21 | actual eyeball itself.
| | 03:23 | So to help me out as I'm doing
adjustments to these vertices, I am going to turn
| | 03:27 | on the Smooth Mesh preview.
| | 03:28 | So I will just go ahead and select both the
face and the eye and I can use the hotkeys.
| | 03:34 | I am going to push 3 and that's
going to turn on the Smooth Mesh preview.
| | 03:37 | So this is going to just show me visually
what the mesh will look like when I smooth it.
| | 03:42 | I can change it back to the
original just by hitting 1.
| | 03:46 | This is going to help me do some
adjustments to these vertices to kind of fill
| | 03:51 | in these gaps between
the eyelid and the eyeball.
| | 03:54 | So I'll click back to the Normal view
and I'll just grab a couple these vertices
| | 04:01 | here and just start moving these around.
| | 04:10 | The goal here is to get a nice
contour of the eyelid that's going to match
| | 04:15 | up with the eyeball.
| | 04:16 | So you shouldn't have these kind
of intersections here or gaps here.
| | 04:19 | It's going to take a little bit of time.
| | 04:21 | Just keep using Smooth preview and you'll get
a pretty good indication of how you're doing.
| | 04:26 | So spend a little time adjusting the eyelid and
I'll go ahead and jump ahead to the end result.
| | 04:43 | You can see here if we turn on Smooth
Mesh preview that the eye is lining up
| | 04:49 | nicely with the contour of the eyelid.
| | 04:51 | So you can really spend as much time as you
want, adding more and more detail to the face.
| | 04:55 | One additional step that I took was to
add one extra edge loop on the lips here
| | 05:01 | and that's just going to help to define
a little more sharply the edge of lip.
| | 05:05 | So that's a pretty good start with
the face and the eye. In the next videos
| | 05:08 | we'll look at doing the rest of the body.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building the body and a wing| 00:00 | Okay, so I've done a little more work
on the head here, just fleshing out the
| | 00:03 | back and adding a few more
details like the ears and the antenna.
| | 00:07 | These are just simple extrusions.
| | 00:09 | Your character may be a little bit
different, so it's not really worth going
| | 00:12 | into too much detail how I did that.
| | 00:14 | So now let's go ahead and tackle the body.
| | 00:16 | I'm going to hit Spacebar to
switch to the Side viewport here.
| | 00:19 | Just take a look at my reference image.
So you can see the body is really kind
| | 00:22 | of these two main shapes.
| | 00:24 | So you have the torso here, which is
this sort of elliptical sphere shape.
| | 00:29 | It's pretty symmetrical.
| | 00:30 | Then you have this back wing shape
that's quite a bit different than the torso.
| | 00:34 | So I think to start fleshing out the
body, a good strategy would be to make a
| | 00:38 | sphere for this front part of the
torso and then work separately on the shape
| | 00:43 | it's going to make the wings.
| | 00:44 | So I'll hit Spacebar to switch to Top view
and I'm just going to draw out a polygon sphere.
| | 00:49 | Go up to Create > Polygon Primitives >
Sphere and just click and drag to line up
| | 00:59 | with the reference image.
| | 01:00 | And back to Side view. I just want to
make sure that I'm getting it aligned in
| | 01:06 | all the views, so I'm just
going to move using the Move tool.
| | 01:12 | And just like with the head, this sphere
that we just drew, this is probably too
| | 01:16 | much geometry for what we need to do.
| | 01:19 | So I'm going to go into the Channel Box.
| | 01:20 | I'm going to click on this polySphere3
INPUT and change the Axis and Height
| | 01:27 | Subdivisions for this sphere, probably
something like 8 Axis Subdivisions and 6
| | 01:34 | Height Subdivisions.
| | 01:35 | It's going to give us more or less the right
amount of geometry that we need for this body.
| | 01:38 | Now just go ahead and make some scale
adjustments to get it to line up with the
| | 01:42 | reference image a little bit more closely.
| | 01:46 | And I'll just hit Spacebar to switch
to the Front view. Do the same thing.
| | 01:50 | Okay, that looks pretty good.
| | 01:57 | Now just like with the face and the
head, we're going to be mirroring just
| | 02:00 | half of this geometry.
| | 02:02 | So we're just going to work on the
right half and then mirror it later on.
| | 02:04 | So I can go ahead and delete
all these faces on the left side.
| | 02:07 | So I'll just hold down my right mouse
button, switch to Face mode, and I can
| | 02:11 | just click and drag to select all those
faces and just go ahead and delete them.
| | 02:17 | And again, since we're going to be
mirroring, we want to make sure that that
| | 02:19 | axis of symmetry on the body is lined up
along the Y-axis just like we did for the head.
| | 02:24 | So I'm just going to go ahead and right-
click and select the whole body and hit
| | 02:29 | W to activate the Move tool.
| | 02:31 | So I want to move this right to the Y-
axis and we do that just by holding down X
| | 02:36 | to snap to grid and I'll snap
right to that Y-axis gridline.
| | 02:40 | So let's make a couple more quick
adjustments to some vertices here.
| | 02:46 | So I'm holding down right mouse
button to switch to Vertex component mode.
| | 02:50 | Let me just drop that down a
little bit and let me just adjust this.
| | 02:57 | Okay, that looks pretty good.
| | 03:02 | So I'll hit Spacebar to
switch back to Side view.
| | 03:07 | And like we said earlier, this front
torso, this is very close to the spherical
| | 03:11 | shape that we have right now.
| | 03:12 | The back wing shape is quite a bit
different, so I'm actually just going to
| | 03:15 | go ahead and delete all of this part in the
back and we can flesh that out separately.
| | 03:19 | So I'll do that with the Split Polygons tool.
| | 03:22 | So I'll go ahead and select the entire sphere.
| | 03:24 | I'm just holding down the
right mouse button here.
| | 03:27 | Now I'll go to Edit Mesh > Split Polygon Tool.
| | 03:33 | In working off the reference image,
I'm just going to click right along this
| | 03:36 | line, this sort of lip where the
wing ends and the torso begins.
| | 03:40 | I'll just click and drag
this. Let me click here.
| | 03:52 | And I'm really only going to look at
the faces that are kind of directly facing
| | 03:56 | the Side view camera.
| | 03:57 | So these ones on top, I'm
not going to worry about.
| | 03:59 | Same thing with this little
sliver down at the bottom.
| | 04:01 | Once I'm done, I'll just hit Enter.
| | 04:05 | Now I can switch back to Face
component mode just by holding down right mouse
| | 04:08 | button, and I'll just go ahead
and select all these faces, so I'm
| | 04:14 | Shift+Selecting here as I click and drag.
| | 04:18 | I can just delete all of those.
| | 04:20 | So I'll hit Spacebar to switch back to
Perspective view and what I want to do
| | 04:25 | here is just grab all these edges that
are left after the faces we just deleted.
| | 04:30 | I'll extrude those out and that will
kind of form the little lip of the wing as
| | 04:33 | it leaves the torso.
| | 04:36 | So I'll right mouse-click, switch to
Edge component mode, select this top one,
| | 04:42 | and I want to get all the way down here.
| | 04:43 | So I'll just Shift+Double-Click and
that will select the entire row of edges.
| | 04:50 | So I'll hit Spacebar to switch to Front
view now and let's go ahead and extrude
| | 04:55 | these out a little bit.
| | 04:56 | So I'll hit Edit Mesh > Extrude, and I
want to be working in world coordinates
| | 05:01 | here, so I'll click this little local
world handle, and I want to move these out
| | 05:09 | away from the body a little bit,
maybe make a couple scale adjustments.
| | 05:14 | This part is really upto
you how you want it to look.
| | 05:17 | I'll hit Spacebar to
switch back to Perspective view.
| | 05:20 | The important thing is we're just kind
of defining this little lip that's formed
| | 05:25 | as the wings come over the torso.
| | 05:27 | So I think that looks pretty good.
| | 05:31 | I'll switch to Side view
just by hitting Spacebar.
| | 05:38 | Now to start forming this wing geometry on
the back here, I'll do another extrusion.
| | 05:42 | I just bring those edges backwards.
| | 05:45 | So I'll click Edit Mesh > Extrude and
again I want world coordinates, not local.
| | 05:50 | So let's bring those back a little bit.
| | 05:54 | Now we'll switch to the Move tool.
| | 05:57 | So what I want to do here is get all
these edges to align vertically and I can
| | 06:02 | do that by snapping to the grid.
| | 06:03 | So I'll just hold down X, click and
drag, and I'll just align these just so
| | 06:10 | they're a little bit past
this farthest vertex back.
| | 06:14 | So I'll do a couple more extrusions to
flesh out the back of the wings there.
| | 06:18 | For time sake, I'll just skip ahead
to a point where I've already done it.
| | 06:27 | So we can see here, I've just done a
couple more extrusions, taking that vertical
| | 06:31 | edge backward, scaling it down a little
bit to follow the contour of the wings,
| | 06:34 | and I've also brought these
vertices down a little bit.
| | 06:37 | Let me just hit Spacebar to switch to Side view.
| | 06:39 | So bring those down to line up with the
tips of the wings a little bit better.
| | 06:45 | So a couple more finishing steps on the body.
| | 06:49 | We want to fill in this hole that forms sort
of the little hump on the back of the wings.
| | 06:55 | To do that, I'll switch to Edge mode, so
I'm just holding down my right mouse button.
| | 07:01 | I'll select this one and I want to
select this whole row, so I'll just
| | 07:04 | Shift+Double-Click, and we'll
get that whole row of edges.
| | 07:07 | So I just want to extrude these in
towards the center, so I'll click Edit Mesh >
| | 07:13 | Extrude, and it's probably easiest to
do this from the Front view, so I'll
| | 07:17 | maximize that by hitting the Spacebar.
| | 07:20 | And I want to switch to world coordinates,
so I'll click this little world local
| | 07:24 | axis handle, and I just
want to scale these down.
| | 07:32 | That looks pretty good.
| | 07:33 | I'll move them in towards the center.
| | 07:35 | Now let's switch to the Side view by
hitting Spacebar and just push these back
| | 07:43 | and continue the contour of the wing
as it rounds out over the back there.
| | 07:48 | Okay, I'll hit Spacebar to
switch to Perspective view.
| | 07:54 | We have one more gap here.
| | 07:55 | And again, since we're going to be
mirroring this, we want to make sure that
| | 07:57 | we're paying attention to our axis of
symmetry, make sure that everything is
| | 08:00 | butting up nicely to the Y-axis.
| | 08:04 | So I'll just do one more
extrusion of these edges.
| | 08:08 | I'm just Shift+Selecting these three edges here.
| | 08:10 | I'll do Edit Mesh > Extrude.
| | 08:17 | And from the Front view,
I'll just hit Spacebar to maximize.
| | 08:20 | I want to work in world coordinates, so
I'll click the local world handle there.
| | 08:25 | So I'm going to move these out, then
we'll switch to the Move tool, hold down X
| | 08:33 | to snap to grid, and just snap
those right to the Y-axis there.
| | 08:38 | So let's switch back to Perspective
view just by hitting Spacebar and so you
| | 08:43 | can see that little gap has been filled in.
| | 08:45 | Now one additional thing we want to do,
you can see I've these tiny edges down
| | 08:50 | here from that last extrusion that I
did to flesh out the back of the wings.
| | 08:54 | I want to grab all those vertices.
| | 08:56 | So I'm just holding down right
mouse button here and switching to
| | 08:58 | Vertex component mode.
| | 09:00 | So let's click and drag to select all those.
| | 09:02 | I'm just going to merge these all
together and that's going to get rid of some
| | 09:04 | excess geometry that we would
otherwise have there in the back of the wing.
| | 09:09 | So I'll click Edit Mesh > Merge, and I might
need to adjust my tolerance on the Merge tool.
| | 09:17 | So let's select Merge with options
and let's just increase that Threshold
| | 09:23 | there to maybe 0.05. Okay.
| | 09:27 | Great! And you can see all those vertices
were merged into just one, so that gets of
| | 09:30 | some excess geometry.
| | 09:31 | It helps us keep our poly count low.
| | 09:37 | So I'll continue to do a little bit
more kind of fine-tuning here, maybe
| | 09:40 | smoothing out this contour to get it to
match a little bit more closely to the wings.
| | 09:45 | For time's sake, I'll just skip ahead.
| | 09:49 | Okay, so I would keep making some
little fine-tuning adjustments, maybe
| | 09:52 | smoothing out this back wing here
to get it to match more closely with
| | 09:55 | the reference image.
| | 09:56 | One additional thing I did was use
the Split Polygon tool to add a couple
| | 10:00 | extra edges here, and that's going to make it
a little bit easier as we go in to do the arms.
| | 10:04 | But that's basically how we flesh out
the body and the wing and in the next
| | 10:08 | video, we'll work on the limbs.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Forming the limbs| 00:00 | So I've done some more work adding
a little bit more detail to the body.
| | 00:03 | So I've done things like flesh
out the collar here up at the top.
| | 00:06 | At this point I think
starting my arms is a good idea.
| | 00:10 | So if we take a look at the reference
image, we can see that our character is
| | 00:13 | kind of a big fat goofy bug with small
spindly arms, so we'll do some extrusions
| | 00:18 | with a small diameter to give
him those insect-like limbs.
| | 00:21 | Now of course your character might not
be a bug, so you might want arms that are
| | 00:25 | more muscular, larger, something like that.
| | 00:27 | But we'll kind of go over
the basics of forming a limb.
| | 00:30 | Another thing to notice in the
reference image is that he has these sort of
| | 00:33 | little shoulder sockets that are
coming off of the wing and the upper arm is
| | 00:37 | actually coming out of the wing itself.
| | 00:40 | This is kind of a cartoony character.
| | 00:42 | The wing is actually sort of almost
like a cape too because it has this little
| | 00:45 | collar that comes up.
| | 00:46 | So you could think of this almost as
like a sleeve that the arm is coming
| | 00:49 | through, and that's kind of one of the
challenges sometimes of working with a
| | 00:53 | cartoony characters, that you can't
always rely on sort of the laws of anatomy as
| | 00:57 | you go through your modeling process.
| | 00:59 | So I'm going to switch to
Face component mode here.
| | 01:01 | I'm just holding down the right mouse
button, and I want to look at this face to
| | 01:05 | start forming that little shoulder socket.
| | 01:08 | Let's switch to the Side view
just so you can see where I'm at.
| | 01:11 | So in the Side view that's kind of the
face that's over that shoulder socket.
| | 01:14 | So I'm just going to do a couple
extrusions here to start forming the geometry
| | 01:19 | that will make that socket that comes off of
the wing between the upper arm and the wing.
| | 01:23 | So I'll click Edit Mesh > Extrude and
I'll just do a couple of extrusions here.
| | 01:29 | I'm just scaling this down. And Edit
Mesh > Extrude again. Scale down again.
| | 01:38 | I want to push this back a little bit
and that's going to kind of form a little
| | 01:41 | lip as that shoulder socket
transitions from the wing.
| | 01:45 | So we'll Edit Mesh > Extrude one
more time, and that's going to be our
| | 01:49 | little sort of bump.
| | 01:50 | That's the shoulder socket that comes off of
the wing and transitions into the upper arm.
| | 01:55 | So I'm going to Extrude one more time
and that's going to form the face that
| | 02:01 | we'll use to extrude and form the
upper arm, and like we said before, just
| | 02:05 | going by the reference image his arms
are real spindly, so I want to make this
| | 02:08 | a pretty small face.
| | 02:10 | So I'm going to switch to Front
view just by clicking Spacebar and one
| | 02:16 | additional thing to notice is that in
this reference image, his arms are bent
| | 02:20 | and we actually want to model his arms
just sticking straight out, kind of
| | 02:23 | fully extended, and that's going to
make it much, much easier later on down the
| | 02:27 | line when we go to do things
like rigging for animation.
| | 02:30 | If we try to model his arms bent like
this, it's just going to create lots of
| | 02:34 | headaches as we try to set it up for animation.
| | 02:36 | So I'm going to deviate a little bit from
the reference image here and that's okay.
| | 02:40 | One thing that's going to help make it
easier as we extrude straight out, let me
| | 02:44 | switch back to Side view
here just by clicking Spacebar.
| | 02:51 | We want to make some adjustments to the
vertices that form this face that we'll
| | 02:55 | use to make the upper arm.
| | 02:56 | So I actually want to make sure that
these are parallel to the X and Y axes,
| | 03:00 | and that will just make it simpler as we do
more extrusions to form the rest of the arm.
| | 03:03 | So I'm going to turn off X-Ray Shading.
| | 03:06 | That will just make it a little
bit more easy to work visually.
| | 03:09 | So Shading, uncheck X-Ray,
we'll switch to Vertex mode.
| | 03:14 | I'm just going to hold down my right
mouse button, Vertex, and for all these
| | 03:20 | vertices around the edge of the face
that we're about to extrude for the
| | 03:22 | arm, we'll just select them in pairs, get
the Move tool, and hold down X to snap to grid.
| | 03:48 | Okay. So I'll switch back to Face Mode.
| | 03:50 | Now, we're ready to do an
extrusion that will form the upper arm.
| | 03:57 | So switch to the Front viewport, and
I'll just do Edit Mesh > Extrude, and I
| | 04:04 | want to extrude this straight out from the body.
| | 04:06 | And rather than doing this in local
coordinates, I want to do this in world
| | 04:09 | coordinates, because I just
want to take it straight out.
| | 04:11 | So I'll click this local world coordinate
handle and just bring this straight out.
| | 04:17 | Now again, this face that I'm extruding for
the arm, I want it to be parallel to the Y-axis.
| | 04:23 | So I'm going to switch to the Move
tool, hold down X to snap to grid, just
| | 04:29 | click-and-drag, and that's going
to snap it parallel to the Y-axis.
| | 04:33 | If we notice from the reference image,
the arm kind of tapers down into this
| | 04:37 | very, very narrow joint at the elbow.
| | 04:39 | So I also want to scale this face down
and I can just do that uniformly. Maybe
| | 04:46 | move it up a little bit with the Move tool.
| | 04:49 | Again, just looking back at the
reference image, you can see right after the
| | 04:52 | elbow, he has kind of got this bigger
upper arm, kind of miniature Popeye arms.
| | 04:56 | So to form that geometry, I'll
do a couple of more extrusions.
| | 05:02 | So I'll extrude out and I'll
scale it up just a little bit.
| | 05:12 | Do Edit Mesh > Extrude again.
| | 05:14 | This time I'm not scaling.
| | 05:16 | I'm just going to bring it out just a
little bit and then Edit Mesh > Extrude
| | 05:19 | one more time and that will form the lower arm.
| | 05:25 | So in addition to forming the shape of
the upper arm as it transitions into the
| | 05:30 | elbow, this is going to give us some
geometry that will make it easier as the
| | 05:33 | arm bends once we go and do some
animation and rigging on this character.
| | 05:39 | So again, that lower arm is going to
taper as it transitions into the wrist.
| | 05:44 | So I'll scale that down a little bit.
| | 05:49 | Then for the hand, we'll just do Edit
Mesh > Extrude, just come out a little bit,
| | 05:54 | and this will form sort of the
base of the palm. And to do the thumb
| | 06:00 | and the forefinger, I'm just going to switch
to Perspective Mode just by hitting Spacebar.
| | 06:10 | So I want to extrude one more time.
| | 06:11 | So Edit Mesh > Extrude, just bring this
out, scale it down, and then grab this
| | 06:22 | face for the thumb, extrude up,
and just scale it down a little bit.
| | 06:33 | So our character doesn't
have very detailed hands.
| | 06:36 | He is a bug, so I think that's okay.
| | 06:41 | As I go through this modeling process,
again, I'll switch back and forth between
| | 06:45 | Smooth Preview by clicking 3.
| | 06:46 | I can get the smooth version, 1, back
to normal, and you can see when I click
| | 06:50 | 3, I'm not getting good amount of detail as
I go through those transitions of the joints.
| | 06:54 | So I'm going to go ahead and just add
a couple of edge loops along the wrist,
| | 06:59 | and at the elbow, and at the shoulder.
| | 07:01 | I'll just do one right now.
| | 07:05 | So do Edit Mesh > Insert Edge Loop,
and just click-and-drag. So maybe right
| | 07:11 | there and that's going to kind of
reinforce that taper of the upper arm as
| | 07:15 | it meets the elbow.
| | 07:16 | So as we can see if we turn the Smooth
Preview back on, that taper of the upper
| | 07:21 | arm gets a little bit more well-defined.
| | 07:23 | So we can continue to add a few more
edge loops at points where we need a little
| | 07:26 | bit more definition, as the
geometry transitions between limbs.
| | 07:31 | For time's sake, I'll just skip ahead.
| | 07:36 | Let's just see what this would
look like with a few extra edge loops.
| | 07:39 | So you can see I've added a couple on
the palm, couple on the thumb, one at the
| | 07:46 | elbow, and one at the shoulder.
| | 07:47 | If we turn on Smooth Preview, you can see you
get a much better definition of the geometry.
| | 07:52 | So the process for creating the rest of
the limbs is going to be pretty similar.
| | 07:55 | Just keep in mind that the key to
creating interesting limbs is really to
| | 07:59 | realize that there are changes in
shape as we go from one joint to the next.
| | 08:02 | It's not just a straight extrusion.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Adding finishing touches| 00:00 | So I've gone ahead and added
some more detail to my character.
| | 00:02 | I've fleshed out the lower arm and
the leg and I've just added a few extra
| | 00:06 | tweaks for instance the lower wing to
here. You can see in the reference image
| | 00:10 | how it kind of splits off
from the other side of the wing.
| | 00:12 | Now, it's time to add a few finishing
touches that we'll need to get our game
| | 00:17 | character ready for UV mapping and
texture editing in the next chapter.
| | 00:21 | These steps will apply to any game
character really, not just this one in particular.
| | 00:26 | The first step I want to do is just make
sure that all the edges of my character
| | 00:31 | are center aligned, so everything that's
going to be along the axis of symmetry
| | 00:36 | is all snapped to the Y-axis, just
like we've been doing in the steps, for
| | 00:39 | instance, modeling the
head and modeling the body.
| | 00:43 | So I've got all these edges selected
here and I'm going to switch out of
| | 00:45 | Perspective mode into my Front view and
I'll use my Move tool, holding down X to
| | 00:55 | snap to the grid, and just make sure
everything is snapped right to that Y-axis.
| | 01:01 | Again, that's just going to make sure
that when we go to mirror our geometry
| | 01:05 | that everything mirrors correctly.
| | 01:06 | I'll switch back to Perspective
view just by hitting the Spacebar.
| | 01:14 | Now, my next step is to merge the geometry
of the head with the geometry of the body.
| | 01:19 | So we model those as two separate pieces
and you can see here there's a little
| | 01:23 | gap between the neck and the torso.
| | 01:26 | So I'm going to merge those together
using the Merge Edge tool and I can
| | 01:31 | activate that by going to the Edit
Mesh menu, down here to Merge Edge Tool.
| | 01:37 | One thing that's helpful as I use
this tool is I can turn on this Wireframe
| | 01:41 | Over-shaded rendering mode and now I
can see all these edges, so I can just see
| | 01:45 | a little bit more clearly
what I'm working with here.
| | 01:48 | So the Merge Edge tool is going to prompt
you to select two edges to merge together.
| | 01:52 | So I just want to select these edge
pairs from the neck to the torso and just
| | 01:58 | click Enter, and Maya is
going to merge those together.
| | 02:00 | Let's just get these other two pairs.
| | 02:05 | So I can bring back the Merge Edge tool.
| | 02:07 | One neat trick in Maya, you can hit the
G hotkey and it will automatically bring
| | 02:11 | up the last tool you had activated.
And so that's really useful if you're doing
| | 02:14 | something repetitive like this.
| | 02:15 | So I'm just clicking those
two edges and hitting Enter.
| | 02:23 | So now the neck is merged with the body.
| | 02:29 | So let's switch to Object mode, just
by holding down the right-mouse button.
| | 02:33 | So the body and the head are connected,
but I still have the eyeball separate
| | 02:37 | from the rest of the body and even
though the edges aren't merged, I want to
| | 02:42 | combine those two meshes so that
Maya treats it all as one object.
| | 02:45 | So I'm just going to Shift+Select both
the entire body with the head and the
| | 02:50 | eyeball, go up to Mesh, and click Combine.
| | 02:56 | So now Maya is going to treat this all
as one object and that's going to make
| | 02:58 | our rendering faster when we
bring the game character into Unity.
| | 03:02 | So I'm pretty much done
with my modeling at this point.
| | 03:05 | One good precaution to take is to
delete the history on your geometry.
| | 03:10 | This can sometimes cause
bugs when you go into Unity.
| | 03:13 | So this is just kind of a precaution to
take to make sure nothing funky happens
| | 03:17 | once we get ready to import our game character.
| | 03:19 | So I'm going to go to Edit > Delete
by Type > History, and that's going to
| | 03:23 | delete all the history on that geometry.
| | 03:26 | Since I'm pretty much done modeling,
I can get rid of my Reference Images.
| | 03:30 | So I'm just going to select all those.
| | 03:33 | Delete and I can delete that layer too.
| | 03:38 | Okay, so those are a few finishing touches.
| | 03:40 | In the next chapter, we're going to
work on UV mapping and texture editing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Insect Character Creation: TexturingUV mapping overview| 00:00 | UV Mapping allows you to add colors and
textures to your character by wrapping
| | 00:03 | flat images on to your model's geometry.
| | 00:06 | UVs are components that represent the
local texture space of each polygon face.
| | 00:11 | So in addition to edges and vertices, your
polygonal geometry also has UV coordinates.
| | 00:17 | UVs look very similar to vertices.
| | 00:19 | But instead of controlling the location
of geometry and space, UVs control the
| | 00:23 | way a texture, image, or
pattern is mapped onto each face.
| | 00:27 | So in the example file here I have
two cubes that are identical in size.
| | 00:31 | But you can see they are
textured pretty differently.
| | 00:33 | So the cube on the left has a nice
checker pattern where the squares are
| | 00:36 | very even. The cube on the right has a checker
pattern where the squares are very distorted.
| | 00:41 | There is some stretching here
that's looking a little funky.
| | 00:43 | So let's take a look at the UV
maps of each one of these cubes.
| | 00:47 | I am just going to select a cube on the
left and bring up the UV Texture Editor.
| | 00:52 | That's under the Window menu.
| | 00:57 | Here, I can get a look at
the UV map of this cube.
| | 01:01 | So let's say that we wanted to apply a
texture to this cube that was on a checkerboard.
| | 01:06 | Well, it would be a process pretty
similar to drawing on an unfolded cardboard box.
| | 01:10 | So you can see each face of the cube here
is laid out flat in the UV Texture Editor.
| | 01:16 | So this UV map would be very nice and
very easy to work with, because we could
| | 01:20 | very easily draw, let's say we wanted
something in the top-left corner on one of
| | 01:23 | the faces, we can just draw it on a flat image.
| | 01:26 | That would map pretty reliably to a
corner of the face that it corresponded
| | 01:29 | to on the 3D geometry.
| | 01:32 | Let's take a look at the cube on the right.
| | 01:34 | So this UV map is looking pretty funky,
so you can see things are stretched.
| | 01:38 | It's not as regular as a UV map of the
cube on the left and if we were to try to
| | 01:43 | texture this cube using this UV map,
there would be a lot of problems.
| | 01:46 | You would get a lot of unexpected distortion.
| | 01:48 | So let's go ahead and look at a
couple of quick edits we can do to minimize
| | 01:51 | some of that distortion.
| | 01:52 | So in the UV Texture Editor, I am just
holding down my right-mouse button and I
| | 01:57 | am going to select UV.
| | 02:00 | Let's look at this one.
| | 02:01 | Just like vertices, you can move
UVs around using the Move tool.
| | 02:04 | You can see as I drag this, in the
Perspective window that texture is already changing.
| | 02:09 | So I am already just with that one little
move I am getting a lot less distortion.
| | 02:13 | So the overall goal when you're UV
mapping a piece of geometry is to minimize
| | 02:17 | the amount of distortion that you get
going from a flat texture, mapping it
| | 02:22 | onto the 3D geometry.
| | 02:23 | Obviously when you are dealing with a
video game character, your geometry is
| | 02:26 | going to be much more
complicated than just a simple cube.
| | 02:30 | So it's pretty unlikely that you
will completely eliminate all stretching
| | 02:33 | and distortion in your UV maps, but
the overall goal should be to minimize
| | 02:37 | stretching and distortion or to move
it to a place on your character that's less visible.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| UV mapping the body parts| 00:00 | Okay, so now that we have an overview
of the goal of UV mapping, let's take a
| | 00:04 | look at some more specific examples
and techniques using an actual character.
| | 00:08 | One thing that I find really helpful
during a UV Mapping process is to map a
| | 00:12 | checkerboard pattern onto my
character, just like I did with the cubes in
| | 00:17 | the previous video.
| | 00:18 | So I am just holding down
my right mouse button here.
| | 00:20 | I am going to select Material Attributes.
| | 00:22 | I am going to map a checkerboard
pattern onto the color node here and this is
| | 00:29 | just going to give me a temporary
visual indication of where distortion and
| | 00:33 | stretching is going to happen in my texture.
| | 00:37 | This is really helpful to
eliminate that kind of distortion.
| | 00:39 | Let's take a look at the UV
map in the UV Texture Editor.
| | 00:44 | So I will select my character, go
to Window > UV Texture Editor. Boy!
| | 00:50 | It's kind of a mess.
| | 00:51 | It can be a little bit hard to know where
to jump in when you first start UV mapping.
| | 00:57 | I think one good spot to pick is the antenna.
| | 01:00 | This is actually going to be a nice
example that's going to transfer to the
| | 01:04 | other appendages kind of
like the arms and the legs.
| | 01:09 | Even though there are certainly
different body parts you can see they are all
| | 01:12 | kind of shaped similarly.
| | 01:13 | So there are actually all sort of
cylindrical and that's going to help us as we
| | 01:18 | go through the UV mapping process to
figure out how to approach UV mapping for
| | 01:23 | those different body parts.
| | 01:26 | So just to give an example of what the
end result is going to be for the antenna
| | 01:30 | I am going to skip ahead here.
| | 01:44 | So this is the end result of my UV
map for the antenna and you can see the
| | 01:48 | checkerboard pattern is nice and regular.
| | 01:51 | The checkerboard squares are spaced
evenly width and height. That's going to just
| | 01:56 | make sure that I get very little
distortion when I go to map an actual texture
| | 02:00 | onto the antenna there.
| | 02:01 | So let's go back to our previous file.
| | 02:04 | We will talk about how to
approach this antenna mapping.
| | 02:11 | So as I mentioned earlier if you think
about the way that the faces on the sides
| | 02:19 | of the antenna flow from one to the
next it's very similar to a cylinder.
| | 02:24 | And one key to successful UV
mapping is to try to think about how your
| | 02:28 | character's geometry will sort of
unfold, because really you are trying to map a
| | 02:32 | flat two-dimensional image
onto three-dimensional geometry.
| | 02:36 | So as we look at the character's
geometry we can look for clues that will help
| | 02:41 | us figure out what's the best way
to UV map at this particular part.
| | 02:44 | I'm going to right-click and
select Face component mode.
| | 02:48 | I am just going to select
the faces on the antenna.
| | 02:51 | So I'll start just by clicking on the
top face and then I can hold down Shift
| | 02:56 | and hit greater than and that's going to
grow my selection down the stock of the
| | 03:00 | antenna and select all
those faces down to the base.
| | 03:04 | That's just an easy way of selecting a
bunch of faces on an appendage like this.
| | 03:08 | So I'm going to focus on the faces
that are on the outside of the antenna.
| | 03:12 | I am actually going to
deselect this face on the top.
| | 03:15 | We will come back to that in just a bit.
| | 03:16 | I am just going to look at these faces
on the outside and what I am going to do
| | 03:20 | to get started here is
apply a cylindrical mapping.
| | 03:23 | So I am going to come up here to this
Create UVs menu and apply a Cylindrical
| | 03:28 | Mapping to these faces. And if I look
in my UV Texture Editor we can see the
| | 03:34 | start of that mapping. That's quite
a bit different than our end result.
| | 03:38 | But in my first step I am just going to
click and drag this away from that top
| | 03:43 | quadrant of the UV Texture Editor
graph and that's just going to separate it
| | 03:46 | from the rest of the UV
maps that are there already.
| | 03:48 | It's going to make it easier for us to come
back and edit this portion of the UV map later on.
| | 03:55 | So one thing I can do to make this
match up more closely with our end result is
| | 03:59 | to adjust the rotation of
the cylindrical mapping.
| | 04:03 | So I can see right now if I look at
the manipulator for the cylindrical
| | 04:07 | mapping, it's oriented straight up
and down. So parallel with the y-axis.
| | 04:11 | What I want to do is actually rotate
it so that it winds up with the axis of
| | 04:14 | symmetry of the antenna.
| | 04:16 | And I will do that from the Front view.
| | 04:19 | So just hit Spacebar to maximize Front
view and I will turn off X-Ray Shading to
| | 04:25 | make it a bit easier to see.
| | 04:27 | So to rotate the Cylindrical Mapping I
am just going to click on this little
| | 04:30 | red handle down here.
| | 04:31 | It's going to bring up my rotate handle
so I will click on that and I can just
| | 04:36 | rotate this from the Front view.
| | 04:37 | So you can see that axis of the
cylindrical mapping is lining up more closely
| | 04:42 | with the axis of symmetry of the antenna.
| | 04:44 | And I can see too in my UV Texture
Editor window the UV map is starting to look
| | 04:49 | a lot more like my end
result than it did before.
| | 04:54 | So there are a lot of little manual
adjustments that I would want to start
| | 04:56 | to make at this point.
| | 04:57 | Let me show you one important one.
| | 04:59 | Let's switch back to Perspective and
one part where there's a lot of distortion
| | 05:05 | is this sort of bottom of
the bulb of the antenna.
| | 05:08 | What's happening here-- let me switch to UV Mode.
| | 05:11 | So I am holding down my right mouse
button and select UV and let's just
| | 05:15 | select these UVs that are at the top of the
stock as they move into the ball of the antenna.
| | 05:26 | Now one of the cool thing is your
UV mapping is to think about the
| | 05:29 | correspondence between what you see in the 3D
views and what you see in the UV Texture Editor.
| | 05:35 | So again that's a cue to think about
how your 3D geometry is going to sort of
| | 05:40 | unfold flat as your UV mapping.
| | 05:43 | So if I zoom-in real close here I can
see there is actually two sets of UVs here.
| | 05:50 | So there is these UVs, which correspond
to the top of the stock of the antenna,
| | 05:57 | and then these UVs are kind of
right next to him right here.
| | 05:59 | So if I Shift+Select this UV you can
see those are kind of lined up right
| | 06:04 | alongside one another.
| | 06:05 | So I want to separate these out a little bit.
| | 06:06 | So I am just going to move those down
with a Move tool. That's going to help a
| | 06:13 | little bit to minimize distortion.
| | 06:15 | Obviously it's not perfect at this
point but I will come back to that in a
| | 06:18 | little bit and do some more tweaking.
| | 06:19 | Before I go much further on that though,
I need to pay some attention to the
| | 06:23 | top of the antenna.
| | 06:25 | So I will switch back to Face mode,
select that face, and I'm going to apply a
| | 06:31 | planar mapping to this phase and then
merge it with our cylindrical mapping that
| | 06:35 | we just created for the rest of the antenna.
| | 06:37 | So click on Create UVs > Planar
Mapping with options and I want to make sure
| | 06:42 | that I'm fitting the
projections at the best planes.
| | 06:44 | So that's going to make a planar
mapping that winds right up with the top
| | 06:48 | face of the antenna.
| | 06:49 | Just click Project and in my UV
Texture Editor again I just want to drag this
| | 06:54 | away from the top right quadrant of
that UV Texture Editor graph. And then to
| | 07:04 | bring up the rest of that antenna
projection I will just right-click over my
| | 07:06 | character and select it.
| | 07:09 | So now I can see I have
got both projections there.
| | 07:12 | So when you are UV mapping each sort of
section of the UV map is referred to as a shell.
| | 07:17 | So right now I have two UV shells that
aren't connected and what I want to do is
| | 07:21 | merge these two together.
| | 07:23 | So I am just going to select UV.
| | 07:25 | So I will just right-mouse-clicking here.
| | 07:28 | So select these four UVs that
represent that planar mapping on the top face.
| | 07:35 | Just move these up a little bit.
| | 07:39 | Now switch to Edge mode and we will
look at something interesting here.
| | 07:41 | When I select an edge of this planar
mapping in the UV Texture Editor window
| | 07:48 | another edge down here
is automatically selected.
| | 07:50 | So what that tells me is that these
two edges on the 3D geometry are butting
| | 07:55 | right up against one another.
| | 07:57 | These two corresponding edges, those
are good candidates for merging together.
| | 08:01 | One thing I would want to do before I
merge these two edges together is to
| | 08:04 | adjust the scale of this planar mapping.
| | 08:06 | So let's switch back to UVs just
holding down right mouse button and then use
| | 08:11 | the Scale tool to scale this down
so it's a little bit closer to be
| | 08:17 | cylindrical mapping.
| | 08:20 | Okay, I will switch back to Edge mode
just holding down right mouse button.
| | 08:24 | Select those two edges and I can merge
them together with this Move and Sew tool.
| | 08:32 | Okay, so now I have one shell
that's going to represent the UV Map for
| | 08:36 | the entire antenna.
| | 08:39 | And I will keep doing some
adjustments here, just moving UVs around.
| | 08:42 | Again the overall goal is to minimize
the distortion in a checkerboard pattern.
| | 08:48 | You want to keep the width and height
as consistent as possible in each of the
| | 08:51 | checkerboard squares.
| | 08:53 | So this process is going to apply
generally to the rest of the appendages.
| | 08:56 | Select the arms and the legs.
| | 08:58 | That's going to be a very similar
process where you are doing one, maybe two
| | 09:02 | cylindrical projections combined
with one or more planar projections.
| | 09:06 | So I will keep doing
some adjustments off screen.
| | 09:08 | Again, the overall goal is to
minimize the amount of distortion on the
| | 09:11 | checkerboard pattern.
| | 09:12 | You want to try to get the width and
the height of the checkerboard squares as
| | 09:16 | consistent as possible.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| UV mapping the face| 00:00 | Okay, so we spent a little time looking at
how to do UV mapping for some of the body parts.
| | 00:03 | Let's switch now
to the face and the head.
| | 00:06 | This can be a little bit daunting since
the geometry is a lot more complicated
| | 00:09 | in the face and the head.
| | 00:11 | Really though an easy technique is to
just kind of split it up into a couple of
| | 00:14 | different UV maps and
then merge those together.
| | 00:17 | So I am going to start off with this
UV map for the face and the head with a
| | 00:21 | combination of three planar projections.
| | 00:23 | So I will do one from the
back for the back of the head.
| | 00:26 | I will do one from the side for these
faces on the side, and then I will do one
| | 00:30 | from the front for the front of the face.
| | 00:34 | So let's start off from the back.
| | 00:35 | I am just going to right-click
and switch to Face component mode.
| | 00:39 | I am just going to go ahead and
select these faces on the back.
| | 00:43 | So now that I have got all these
selected, let's go ahead and apply a Planar
| | 00:50 | Mapping to the back of the head.
| | 00:53 | So I will select Create UVs
> Planar Mapping with options.
| | 00:56 | I will fit the projection to the
Bounding Box and I want to project from the
| | 01:02 | Z-axis, so that's going to make the
projection perpendicular to the back of the head.
| | 01:07 | So I will just come down here and click
Project, and just like we did before in
| | 01:14 | the UV Texture Editor, I will just click
-and-drag this projection away from the
| | 01:19 | top-right quadrant of
the UV Texture Editor grid.
| | 01:23 | Okay, so now I'll select some faces on the
side of the head and do another Planar Projection.
| | 01:34 | So now I have got these faces selected.
| | 01:36 | I will go ahead and do another Planar
Mapping with options, and this time I want
| | 01:43 | to project from the X-axis.
| | 01:44 | So that's going to project from the
side of the character, kind of from this
| | 01:49 | perspective more or less.
| | 01:50 | So I will click Project and again just drag
this away from the UV Texture Editor grid.
| | 02:01 | Okay. We've got one more to go.
| | 02:02 | So I am going to select these
faces on the front, the face.
| | 02:08 | Just click and rotate this. Let me click here.
| | 02:15 | Okay, so I've got all these faces
selected on the front of the face and I will
| | 02:19 | go up to Create UVs > Planar Mapping
with options and this time again we want to
| | 02:24 | project from the Z-axis, so we will be
looking straight on from the front of the
| | 02:28 | face for this projection.
| | 02:29 | I will click Project, and again just
click-and-drag that away from the top
| | 02:36 | right quadrant of the UV Texture Editor graph.
| | 02:39 | So let's go ahead and select our
character, and look at what we have so far.
| | 02:46 | So these are the three different shells
from the three planar projections we just made.
| | 02:50 | To make these a little bit more manageable,
I will just separate them apart from one another.
| | 02:53 | One really nice trick when you're
working with shells in the UV Texture
| | 02:57 | Editor, you can switch to UV
component mode just by holding down your
| | 03:01 | right-mouse button.
| | 03:02 | I want to grab this whole
shell from the back of the head.
| | 03:05 | All I need to do is select one UV.
| | 03:08 | Then I am going to hold down Ctrl and
right-click, and select this To Shell option.
| | 03:13 | So, that's basically just going to
fill-in all of the UVs in that shell.
| | 03:17 | That way I can just grab the whole
thing and with the Move tool I can just move
| | 03:22 | it away, so that it's not overlapping anymore.
| | 03:24 | It is just going to make it a
little bit easier to work with.
| | 03:26 | I will do the same thing
for these other two shells.
| | 03:30 | So again, I am just holding down Ctrl
and right-click, selecting To Shell.
| | 03:41 | Okay, so let's take a minute and
look at the shape of this head here.
| | 03:45 | So the front projection looks pretty
good and the side projection looks pretty
| | 03:50 | good too. So you can see kind of how
that geometry flows from the front of the
| | 03:54 | face around to the back.
| | 03:58 | But actually you can see that this
face, at first glance, it looks like it's
| | 04:02 | going to line up really nicely, the
shell for the back of the head, and the
| | 04:05 | shell for the side of the head, but if
we think about the way the edges flow
| | 04:09 | from one to another, we can see that this is
actually backwards. And that happen sometimes.
| | 04:15 | So we can get a good visual
indication of UVs that are backwards, they are
| | 04:20 | called flipped UVs, with
this Toggle Shaded UV Display.
| | 04:25 | Let's turn that option on, and I can
see here now the UV Texture Editor is going
| | 04:28 | to color code my UV maps and it is going to
show me blue for UV maps that are facing outwards.
| | 04:35 | It is going to show me red
for UV maps that are flipped.
| | 04:38 | They're actually facing inwards.
| | 04:39 | So I want to make sure that all my UV
maps are blue, so everything is facing
| | 04:42 | outwards towards the outside of the model.
| | 04:45 | So a really easy way to fix this is
just to, again, I am going to select UV,
| | 04:50 | Ctrl+Right-click, select To Shell.
| | 04:54 | So I want to select this entire shell
for the back of the head, then select
| | 04:57 | Polygons > Flip, okay.
| | 05:00 | So now, I just flip the
UVs for the back projection.
| | 05:08 | I can also see a couple of places here
in the projection for the face where some
| | 05:13 | of the UVs are red and some of the UVs are blue.
| | 05:16 | That's really just a matter of doing
some manual adjustment of these UVs.
| | 05:20 | So as I select that UV for instance
and pull this inward, this is kind of the
| | 05:26 | eyelid shape right now.
| | 05:28 | That's going to flip back to blue.
| | 05:29 | So really it's just a matter of
looking at the shells that are completely
| | 05:33 | red and flipping those.
| | 05:39 | So one step I will go through before I
start doing much more fine-tuning like
| | 05:42 | this is to just merge
these three shells together.
| | 05:45 | So I can select the Edge component mode,
and just like we saw in the last video,
| | 05:51 | as I select these edges, the UV Texture
Editor is going to show me which edges
| | 05:55 | correspond to one another.
| | 05:59 | That's going to give me some good
cues for how to move these around.
| | 06:01 | So I can move these UVs manually.
| | 06:05 | What I like to do sometimes is hold down
the V key as I move and that will help
| | 06:11 | those UVs just snap to
their corresponding edges.
| | 06:14 | Then I can switch back to Edge mode,
and just Shift+Select and I can sew these
| | 06:32 | selected edges together.
| | 06:36 | So I'll go ahead and keep doing that
for all the edges in all three UV maps.
| | 06:43 | For the sake of time, I will just
skip ahead to the finished map to show
| | 06:47 | you what it looks like.
| | 06:48 | So in the end, this is more or less
what your UV map for the face would look
| | 07:01 | like for this character.
| | 07:02 | Again, you can see I have tried to
minimize as much as possible the distortion
| | 07:06 | in the checkerboard pattern.
| | 07:07 | And one thing that I found helpful
is kind of like we did in the previous
| | 07:10 | modeling chapter to toggle Smooth
Preview on and off, and that's going to give
| | 07:15 | me a good indication of what this
will actually look like when it's smooth
| | 07:18 | because that might be a little bit
different than just a very low poly version.
| | 07:23 | So you may need to spend some more time
doing some manual adjustment to your UVs.
| | 07:28 | Remember the goal is to minimize the
distortion in the checkerboard pattern.
| | 07:32 | With parts that are more complicated
like the face, it's really more about
| | 07:35 | minimizing and hiding the distortion.
| | 07:37 | You're never really going to
completely eliminate it all.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| UV mapping wrap-up| 00:00 | So I spent some more time
finishing out the UV map for the rest of my
| | 00:03 | character's geometry, and I've tried
my best to minimize distortion in the
| | 00:07 | checkerboard pattern that
I'm using in my material.
| | 00:10 | There is a couple of places where I
deliberately placed scenes or distortions
| | 00:13 | where it'd be least visible.
| | 00:15 | So one example that is here behind
the leg you can see, the pattern gets a
| | 00:19 | little bit distorted.
Some of that is unavoidable.
| | 00:21 | The trick is to just place it in a part
of the character where it's least visible.
| | 00:25 | And you can see in the UV Texture
Editor window that I've separated out each UV
| | 00:29 | shell into parts kind of
based on the body structure.
| | 00:32 | So I have the face, the front of the
torso, the back of the torso, and so on.
| | 00:36 | And this'll give me a logical
reference as I go into Photoshop to create the
| | 00:41 | character's texture.
| | 00:42 | So I'll know that I'll be able to paint on
the front of the torso, the face, and so on.
| | 00:47 | I've also made sure that all the UVs
are facing forward and I can see this
| | 00:50 | visually since I've got my shaded UV display
turned on and all the shells are shaded blue.
| | 00:56 | So the final step in our UV mapping
process is to move and scale all of the
| | 01:01 | UV shells so that they fit in this upper
right quadrant of the UV Texture Editor graph.
| | 01:06 | Now the reason we want this is that,
as UV sit outside of that upper-right
| | 01:11 | quadrant, they'll tend to make the
texture repeat and wrap back onto itself.
| | 01:16 | Now this would make sense if our
model were something like a brick wall for
| | 01:19 | instance where we had a tiling
texture that repeated over-and-over again.
| | 01:23 | In this case though our character's
texture is going to be pretty much a
| | 01:26 | one-to-one relationship. We
don't want anything to really repeat
| | 01:29 | over-and-over again.
| | 01:30 | So I'm going to go ahead and start
scaling these shells to fit back in that
| | 01:34 | upper right-hand quadrant.
| | 01:36 | As I do this, I can scale the shells
selectively, since the larger shell is in
| | 01:41 | the UV Texture Editor graph, the more
detail that part of the character's
| | 01:44 | geometry can have.
| | 01:46 | So a good technique to use this is to
start with parts of the body that you want
| | 01:49 | to have more detail. So let's look at the face.
| | 01:51 | I'm going to go ahead and switch to
UV mode by holding down my right mouse
| | 01:55 | button and selecting UV.
| | 01:57 | I'll just click on any one of the UVs in
the face shell and then hold down Ctrl,
| | 02:03 | right-click, and select To Shell, so
I'll select that entire shell for the face
| | 02:08 | and I'll click W to get my Move tool.
| | 02:11 | I just start dragging this around.
| | 02:14 | Down to that upper right quadrant of
the UV Texture Editor graph and now I'll
| | 02:18 | switch to my Scale tool
and just scale this down.
| | 02:23 | Now I want to make sure that for
all these shells as I'm scaling that
| | 02:29 | I'm scaling uniformly.
| | 02:36 | So probably the parts of the character
that I want to have the most detail are
| | 02:39 | the face and probably the torso.
| | 02:46 | So I'll fit those in first and then kind
of scale everything down to fit around it.
| | 02:51 | So I'll spend some more time moving and
scaling my shells until I get everything
| | 02:55 | to fit into that upper right
quadrant of the UV Texture Editor graph.
| | 02:59 | Okay, so I spend some more time scaling
and moving the UV shells from my character.
| | 03:04 | Again, we want everything to fit in
this upper-right quadrant of the UV
| | 03:08 | Texture Editor graph, and we're almost ready
to mirror this model to make it symmetrical.
| | 03:13 | So when I mirror this half of the model
that I've already created, the UV shells
| | 03:16 | will be duplicated right on top of
each other, and this will allow me to give
| | 03:20 | more texture detail to the overall
model but it also constrains me to having
| | 03:25 | totally symmetrical texturing.
| | 03:27 | So if I wanted to texture the model
in a way where one side look different
| | 03:30 | from the other, I would need to leave extra
room in my UV map for shells from the other side.
| | 03:35 | Okay, so we're pretty much done with UV
mapping. In the next video we'll mirror
| | 03:40 | our geometry and get the
character ready for texturing.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Mirroring | 00:00 | So we finished our UV mapping process
for a character and now I'm ready to
| | 00:04 | actually mirror the geometry
so you make it symmetrical.
| | 00:07 | So I'll go ahead and select my character and
I'm going to mirror using Duplicate Special.
| | 00:11 | So I'll click Edit >
Duplicate Special, with options.
| | 00:15 | And I want to create a copy of
my half that I've already modeled.
| | 00:20 | And I want to set the Scale in the X
direction to -1 since all my geometry is in
| | 00:24 | the positive X direction right now.
We want to mirror that into negative X.
| | 00:29 | So I'll click Duplicate Special. Okay.
| | 00:31 | And I'll just Shift+Select so I have
both sides of the character selected.
| | 00:36 | I'll use Mesh Combine to
combine these into one mesh.
| | 00:41 | Now even though this is all one mesh now,
the vertices and the edges along the
| | 00:45 | character's axis of symmetry are still separate.
| | 00:47 | So I need to merge those together.
| | 00:48 | So I'm going to do that with
Edit Mesh > Merge, with options.
| | 00:56 | Now one thing I need to watch out for
is in places like the face where there's
| | 00:59 | more detail, there's geometry that's
closer together, I need to be careful that
| | 01:03 | I don't accidentally merge some of these
vertices and edges that aren't actually
| | 01:07 | on the character's axis of symmetry.
| | 01:09 | So I want to set a very low
Threshold here in my Merge Options.
| | 01:13 | So I'm going to set this
to 0.0001 and click Merge.
| | 01:19 | Okay, so I'll select my character.
| | 01:20 | I'm just holding down my
right mouse button. Click Select.
| | 01:23 | And I'm going to go into the
Outliner, so I'll click Window > Outliner.
| | 01:28 | I'm just going to rename this, so we'll
double-click and rename this mesh low_poly.
| | 01:36 | And I'll also delete the history on the mesh,
so I'll go to Edit > Delete by Type > History.
| | 01:42 | Sometimes if you don't delete the
history on a video game character, Unity can
| | 01:46 | get kind of confused and throw in
some bugs when you go to import it.
| | 01:49 | So it's a good habit to get into.
| | 01:52 | So I'll close my Outliner and I'll
create a layer for this character by
| | 01:56 | clicking Layers, so I'm in
my Channel Box Layer Editor.
| | 01:59 | So I'll click Layers > Create Layer
from Selected, and I'll title this
| | 02:04 | layer low_poly_layer.
| | 02:07 | Now I'll make a duplicate of the
entire game character, so I'll just select
| | 02:12 | Edit > Duplicate, and I'll create another
layer by clicking Layers > Create Layer from Selected.
| | 02:19 | And in this layer I'll title hi_poly_layer.
| | 02:29 | Also in the Outliner, so Window > Outliner.
| | 02:32 | I'll rename that to hi_poly.
| | 02:37 | So what I'm doing here is I'm actually
creating two versions of my character.
| | 02:41 | One, which is in the hi_poly_layer,
I'm going to apply a Mesh Smooth too.
| | 02:47 | I want to make it very smooth, very organic.
| | 02:49 | And if I wanted to, I could do some
extra sculpting to add extra detail.
| | 02:53 | And then in the next chapter, we'll
use a normal map to capture some of that
| | 02:57 | detail and apply it to the low_poly
version without adding any excess geometry.
| | 03:02 | So it's a neat trick that you can use
to make a character look like it has
| | 03:06 | more detail than it actually does in
its geometry and it's used a lot in
| | 03:10 | video game character modeling.
| | 03:12 | So I've got my hi_poly_layer turned on.
| | 03:13 | I'm going to go ahead and apply a Mesh
Smooth operation to this copy of the character.
| | 03:19 | So I'll select Mesh > Smooth, with options.
| | 03:23 | And I want to add divisions exponentially.
| | 03:24 | I want my Division levels set
to 2, my Continuity set to 1.
| | 03:29 | I want to smooth the UVs.
| | 03:31 | I want to smooth all the map borders,
and I don't want to preserve any of
| | 03:35 | the stuff down here.
| | 03:37 | So I'll click Smooth, and now we can see
we've got very nice smooth version of the model.
| | 03:43 | But you also notice, look
how many triangles we have.
| | 03:46 | It's a very, very high poly count, so that's
way more than we would ever want in our video game.
| | 03:51 | But that's okay because we're just
going to use this to capture normal map and
| | 03:54 | apply it to the low_poly version.
| | 03:56 | So I'll turn off this hi_poly_
layer and turn on the low_poly_layer.
| | 04:02 | And so with the low_poly version, I've
a pretty low_poly count here and that's
| | 04:06 | looking pretty good.
| | 04:07 | I'm actually going to
smooth this version a little bit.
| | 04:09 | You don't have to do this.
| | 04:10 | I'm planning to use this
character in a desktop platform.
| | 04:14 | So I can afford to add a
little bit more geometry.
| | 04:17 | Your character might be running on a
different platform like an iPhone or an Android.
| | 04:20 | So you may want to keep
your poly count much lower.
| | 04:22 | I'm just going to smooth this version a
little bit to add a little bit more detail.
| | 04:27 | So I'll select my low_poly version.
Select Mesh > Smooth, with options.
| | 04:32 | And this time I'm going to add
divisions linearly. Set my Division levels to 1,
| | 04:38 | Divisions per face to 1, and the
Push strength and Roundness to 0.1.
| | 04:43 | and I'll just click Smooth.
| | 04:45 | Okay, so that did increase my poly count,
but it's still within the range that's
| | 04:49 | reasonable for a desktop platform.
| | 04:51 | Again, you might be running on a
different platform, so you may have a different
| | 04:55 | goal in mind for your poly count.
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| Texturing| 00:00 | Let's get ready to apply a
texture to our character.
| | 00:02 | I am working with the hi_poly
version of my character that we worked on
| | 00:06 | the previous video.
| | 00:08 | So I use the UV map that I created
in the previous chapters to export a
| | 00:11 | reference into Photoshop that I
can use as I paint my texture image.
| | 00:15 | So I'll select my hi_poly version,
open up the UV Texture Editor.
| | 00:20 | So Window > UV Texture Editor
and select Polygons > UV Snapshot.
| | 00:29 | The UV Snapshot is just going to
basically export an image that shows that the
| | 00:35 | UV map of the character I have
selected and that I can use as a reference in
| | 00:39 | Photoshop as I go to add images and
textures and patterns that will then get
| | 00:43 | mapped onto my character.
| | 00:48 | So I set the Size of my UV Snapshot to
1024x1024 and I will just save this out
| | 00:57 | to the default folder so this is saving
to the image folder in my Maya project
| | 01:01 | and I will set the Image Format to Targa.
| | 01:06 | The image format isn't all that important.
| | 01:07 | You can really set it to whatever
you want. And I will just click OK.
| | 01:11 | So I can open my UV Snapshot in
Photoshop and start painting right over it.
| | 01:18 | I can add colors and textures to the
different body parts by painting over their
| | 01:21 | shelves on the UV Snapshot.
| | 01:23 | So I am going to spend some time in
Photoshop just painting and creating a
| | 01:26 | texture for my character.
| | 01:27 | So let's spend time in Photoshop just
painting and creating some textures and
| | 01:32 | colors from my character.
| | 01:33 | I have used the Gradient tool, the
Brush tool and a few other tools.
| | 01:36 | It's really up to you how you want this to look.
| | 01:38 | So let's switch back to Maya and we
can apply this texture to our character.
| | 01:42 | So I close out my UV Texture Editor,
right-click, and hold down over the hi_poly
| | 01:48 | version, and we will assign a new material.
| | 01:51 | That's a Lambert shader, and we will
map the Color node to our Photoshop file.
| | 02:03 | So I saved out my UV Snapshot as a
Photoshop file called hi-res-bug-texture in
| | 02:09 | my source images folder in my Maya project.
| | 02:12 | So the texture is applied.
| | 02:14 | It's looking a little bit weird so I
just need to make one adjustment here.
| | 02:17 | I am just going to right-click and
select Material Attributes and it looks
| | 02:23 | like Maya has automatically mapped our
Photoshop files to both the Color and
| | 02:27 | the Transparency nodes.
| | 02:28 | I just want to right-click over to
Transparency and click Break Connection,
| | 02:32 | because I am not using
transparency in my texture.
| | 02:34 | So we've got a nice texture
applied to our high res version.
| | 02:38 | Now in the next chapter we will use the
high res version to create a normal map
| | 02:42 | that we can then apply to the low_poly version.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Normal mapping| 00:00 | In the last video we applied a
texture to our high poly character.
| | 00:04 | In this video we will create a normal
map from the high poly character and apply
| | 00:08 | it to the low poly character that will
allow us to add some more detail to the
| | 00:11 | low poly character
without adding extra geometry.
| | 00:13 | So to start I go to my Channel Box/Layer
Editor and make sure both the high poly
| | 00:19 | and the low poly layers are turned on.
| | 00:21 | And you notice that two meshes are
sitting right on top of one another.
| | 00:24 | That's exactly what we want when
we go through this process.
| | 00:26 | I am going to come up here and
switch to the Rendering menu and under
| | 00:30 | Lighting/Shading bring
up the Transfer Maps tool.
| | 00:34 | I am also going to bring up the
Outliner. So go to Window > Outliner.
| | 00:41 | This will just make it a little bit easier
to select between the two different meshes.
| | 00:45 | So my Target Mesh I want to set to
the low poly version of my character.
| | 00:50 | So in Outliner I am going to
select low_poly and click Add Selected.
| | 00:53 | In my Source Mesh I want to make sure its
set to the high poly version of my character.
| | 01:00 | So in Outliner I click hi_
poly and click Add Selected.
| | 01:06 | Now one of the settings I want to
take a look at in the Target Mesh is
| | 01:09 | this search envelope.
| | 01:10 | So the two meshes aren't exactly the same
shape. There is a little bit of deviation.
| | 01:15 | So we want to make sure that Maya
searches just a little bit outside the Target
| | 01:18 | Mesh to make sure that it
captures all the geometry.
| | 01:21 | So if we increase the Search envelope,
well, nothing happens because we need to
| | 01:25 | set this Display to display
both the mesh and the envelope.
| | 01:29 | So now as we increase the Search
envelope you can see Maya is going to give us
| | 01:34 | that sort of pink representation of
how far away from the Target Mesh it's
| | 01:38 | going to be searching.
| | 01:39 | You don't want it to have this too big.
Otherwise it's going to make Maya take a
| | 01:42 | really-really long time, because it's
going to be searching for an area that's
| | 01:46 | way outside the Target Mesh.
| | 01:48 | So if you are doing it visually you
just want to make sure that the Search
| | 01:51 | envelope is outside of both
the Target and the Source Mesh.
| | 01:56 | I am just going to set this to 1.5%.
| | 02:00 | It might be different depending on your
character and I will just turn off this
| | 02:04 | Search envelope display for now.
| | 02:05 | So now in our Output Maps we are going
to tell Maya which sorts of texture maps
| | 02:10 | to generate through this process.
| | 02:12 | So we want to do a Normal map
and we want to do a Diffuse map.
| | 02:16 | So what that's going to do is transfer
both the visual texture that we applied
| | 02:22 | to the high poly version and it's going
to transfer a normal map, which is going
| | 02:27 | to help capture some of the detail from
a high poly version without adding extra
| | 02:30 | geometry to our low poly version.
| | 02:33 | So for both of these I am going
to set the File format to Targa.
| | 02:42 | The file format is not extremely important.
| | 02:44 | You could really set it to whatever you want.
| | 02:46 | Targa is just kind of a
standard for working with 3D models.
| | 02:48 | And I am going to save this
to my source images folder.
| | 02:51 | This one is the Normal map. So I will
title this bug-low-poly-normal and click
| | 02:59 | Save and the color map I will
set to bug-low-poly-texture.
| | 03:10 | And under Connect Output Maps I want
to connect both of these images to the
| | 03:14 | shader of the Target Map so that's the
low poly version of our model and I want
| | 03:19 | to connect them both to a new shader.
| | 03:20 | So Maya is automatically going to
create a new shader for the low poly version
| | 03:24 | and it's going to attach both the
Texture and the Normal map to that shader.
| | 03:28 | Then under Maya Common Output I
will set the Map width and height both
| | 03:35 | to 1024x1024 pixels.
| | 03:38 | I want to Transfer in World Space and
the Sampling quality? At first you probably
| | 03:43 | want to start out with a Low sampling
quality if you are just doing testing.
| | 03:46 | I am going to set this to High.
| | 03:48 | It's going to take a lot longer so
again before you get this perfect do it on
| | 03:52 | Low couple of times maybe just to see
that it's going to work and give you the
| | 03:55 | results that you want.
| | 03:56 | I am going to increase this Filter size to 8.
| | 04:00 | Again, this is another setting that you
want to start out with Low til you get
| | 04:03 | it looking good and then increase it.
| | 04:05 | And Fill texture seams,
I'm going to set this to 4.
| | 04:08 | So this will actually cause the
texture image to bleed out over the UV shells
| | 04:13 | and if you set this to 0 or 1 what can
happen is the seams of the UV maps can
| | 04:18 | sometimes end up looking a little bit funky.
| | 04:20 | So just make sure that all the seams in the
UV maps transition nicely into one another.
| | 04:24 | Then I am going to click Bake and Close and
this process can take a long time, so be patient.
| | 04:31 | It's probably a good idea to do a couple
of test with the sample quality and the
| | 04:35 | filter size set lower,
| | 04:37 | so you don't have to wait around
quite as much to see the results.
| | 04:41 | Okay, so our Transfer Maps process is finished.
| | 04:43 | I am going to go ahead and turnoff
this hi_poly_layer and you can see our
| | 04:47 | low_poly_layer now has the texture
applied to it from the high poly layer.
| | 04:51 | So I will do a little bit of cleanup in
Photoshop as necessary but now our low
| | 04:55 | poly version of the model has both the
Texture and a Normal map, so it's going
| | 04:59 | to help it to look a little bit more
detailed once we import it into Unity.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Insect Character Creation: Rigging and AnimatingSetting up the skeleton| 00:00 | So now we are ready to give our low poly
character ready for rigging an animation.
| | 00:04 | So let's think about what that means.
| | 00:06 | We are getting him ready to move
around and animate, maybe walk, maybe run.
| | 00:10 | So we need to tell Maya where
his body parts are going to bend.
| | 00:12 | So basically where his joints are going to
be and we do that by setting up a skeleton.
| | 00:16 | So I am going to switch to the
Animation menu and I will start out in the
| | 00:22 | front viewport here.
| | 00:23 | I am just going to maximize
that by clicking the spacebar.
| | 00:26 | So you will notice I've deleted the high
poly layer and the high poly version of
| | 00:31 | our model, because we are done with
that and all we needed that in our last
| | 00:33 | chapter for was to give the normal map.
| | 00:35 | So we are just working
with the low poly character.
| | 00:38 | I am going to go ahead and create a new
layer where our skeleton is going to go.
| | 00:41 | Let me call it skeleton.
| | 00:45 | And I will start the skeleton with a Joint tool.
| | 00:48 | So I am going to click on Skeleton >
Joint Tool and I want to draw the first
| | 00:55 | joint in the skeleton right about
where this character's pelvis would be.
| | 00:59 | As I do that I am going to hold down
the X key to snap to grid. Just like we
| | 01:04 | did when we modeled the character, we
are only going to build about half of
| | 01:06 | the skeleton and then we can mirror it
over the Y axis since we already know
| | 01:10 | our geometry symmetrical we can build
the symmetrical skeleton too and that
| | 01:13 | will save us some work.
| | 01:14 | So I am holding down X. I am
just going to click right there.
| | 01:19 | So that's our first joint and as I do
this I am going to bring up the Outliner
| | 01:23 | by clicking Window > Outliner.
| | 01:27 | As I build my skeleton I am just going
to title each one of the joints and this is
| | 01:32 | a really good practice to get into as
we go through animation and as we bring
| | 01:36 | our character into Unity. This will make it
much, much easier to work with so we will
| | 01:40 | know that we will have a left hip and
left knee for instance as opposed to
| | 01:43 | joint 12 and joint 13.
| | 01:45 | This is just going to make a lot more sense.
| | 01:46 | So with the Joint tool still activated
I will switch out of Front view back to
| | 01:50 | my four panel view and I am actually
going to look from both the side and the
| | 01:55 | front since I'll need to align
these joints to the geometry.
| | 01:58 | So just keep clicking only to the left hip now.
| | 02:02 | So I will click to place that joint
right about there, right about where that
| | 02:06 | left hip would bend, and from the side
view I will click W to turn on my Move
| | 02:10 | tool and just move that up a little bit.
| | 02:12 | So that's positioned more
closely to the center of the leg.
| | 02:15 | I will click back to activate my Joint
tool and we will do the knee and I'll
| | 02:27 | just move that forward.
| | 02:28 | So you might notice now that Maya didn't
draw in the bone between those two joints.
| | 02:33 | Let's take a look again in the Outliner.
| | 02:37 | So you can see I have this joint too.
| | 02:41 | So that's going to be my knee joint.
| | 02:42 | Let me just re-title that and I have this
root joint, which is my root and my hip joint.
| | 02:49 | So if I expand this see I have the joint
from my hip and I will just label that Hip_L.
| | 02:56 | I can see in the hierarchy the hip is
underneath root and then knee is down here by itself.
| | 03:01 | Where I want this to be in
hierarchy is underneath the hip.
| | 03:04 | So we go root > hip > knee.
| | 03:05 | So I am just going to middle-mouse drag
and drop that knee under the hip and you
| | 03:10 | see Maya automatically builds in a
bone in-between those two joints.
| | 03:14 | So the skeleton is really
just arranged by its hierarchies.
| | 03:17 | So you go knee down to ankle, to toe and so on.
| | 03:25 | And if you don't want to do parenting
for every single joint like this-- let me
| | 03:29 | just undo this here--
| | 03:30 | we can also go to Skeleton > Insert Joint tool.
| | 03:35 | This way if we click on that knee
joint we can just draw a joint down to the
| | 03:39 | ankle with a bone already attached and
it's going to handle the parenting for us.
| | 03:42 | So then from the Front view I'll
just align that with the ankle and
| | 03:49 | keep labeling as I go.
| | 03:50 | So this is the ankle left.
| | 03:58 | So let's look at the foot.
| | 03:59 | Now for the foot I want to do
one joint down here for the heel.
| | 04:03 | Now I want to do one joint here for the
ball of the foot and then one joint for
| | 04:07 | the toe and that's going to help
it bend a little bit more naturally.
| | 04:11 | So I will get my Joint tool back, so
we will do one for the heel and that's
| | 04:19 | going to parent to the left ankle.
| | 04:21 | Be sure to hit Enter to finalize that.
| | 04:25 | So back to the Joint tool.
| | 04:26 | So there will be one for the ball
of the foot and then one for the toe.
| | 04:29 | So we will title that Ball_L and
Toe_L and this joint chain can be parented
| | 04:42 | to the ankle as well.
| | 04:45 | Then from the Front view I am just going
to align those joints with the Move tool.
| | 04:51 | So I am going to move that ball of
the foot to line up with the foot and
| | 04:58 | same thing for the heel.
| | 05:04 | So you can see how to make joints
and bones for a structure like a limb.
| | 05:07 | The main things to remember are to
place joints where you want a change in
| | 05:11 | motion and also to
consistently label your joints.
| | 05:14 | It's really going to save you a lot
of work when we get to later stages like animation.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Building the spine| 00:00 | Okay, so I've drawn out the bones for my
leg joints. Let's go ahead and work on
| | 00:04 | the spine a little bit.
| | 00:05 | Before I go any further, I'm just going
to do a little bit of housekeeping here.
| | 00:08 | In my Outliner, I'm going to select my
root joint, and all the joints below it,
| | 00:13 | and just make sure that those
are placed in the Skeleton layer.
| | 00:17 | Then my low poly layer where my
geometry is, I'm going to set that to a
| | 00:21 | Reference layer, so that I don't
accidentally select it as I'm going through
| | 00:25 | and placing joints.
| | 00:26 | So let me just zoom in here.
| | 00:31 | So for the spine, I'm going to draw a few
joints leading up the center of the character.
| | 00:36 | So the first one I'm going to draw
is going to be aligned where the lower
| | 00:41 | arms kind of branch off.
| | 00:43 | So I'll have a spine joint here, and then
I'll start the joints for lower arm later on.
| | 00:48 | So I'll bring up my Joint tool by
clicking Skeleton > Joint Tool and as I place this,
| | 00:53 | I'm going to Snap to Grid, because
I want to make sure this is all aligned
| | 00:56 | to the Y-axis for mirroring later on.
| | 00:59 | So I will set one and I'm
going to title this Spine1.
| | 01:03 | I'll just move that up a little bit.
| | 01:06 | So I'm just going to zoom-in, and use
my Move tool, just to slide this up a
| | 01:12 | little bit, so that we're
aligned with the lower arms.
| | 01:15 | I am going to draw another joint above
it, in between this joint and then the
| | 01:23 | point on the body where the
upper arms are going to branch off.
| | 01:27 | So bring up the Joint tool again, Snap
to Grid, and do one more. And just clean
| | 01:41 | these up in the Outliner and then these
are going to parent to the root joint.
| | 01:55 | I'll just keep labeling these. Now
since there is no left or right spine here,
| | 01:58 | so these are all aligned to the center.
| | 02:00 | So I'm just going to number these sequentially.
And let's go ahead and switch to the Side view.
| | 02:05 | So we can see right now the spine is
oriented straight up and down and that's
| | 02:16 | not really how spines work.
| | 02:17 | You want to add a little bit of a
curvature and kind of follow more towards the
| | 02:20 | back of the wing contour here.
| | 02:22 | So I'm just going to move
these joints just a little bit.
| | 02:28 | So move these back just to
kind of follow that profile.
| | 02:33 | Let's make it a little bit more natural.
| | 02:39 | That looks pretty good.
| | 02:41 | Now, another step I'm going to
take with the spine is to build some
| | 02:45 | joints coming out that will help to control
sort of the abdominal area of the character.
| | 02:50 | That will help the character deform in
a more natural way as he sort of bends
| | 02:53 | over or arches his back.
| | 02:55 | So I'm going to close my Outliner here.
| | 02:58 | So I'm going to add just a few joints here and
I'll bring my Outliner back up to parent these.
| | 03:07 | So this I'll just call Rib1, because we
think of it as just kind of like a rib cage,
| | 03:11 | and that will parent to root.
| | 03:13 | I'll bring the Joint tool back up
again and I'll make a rib for Spine1.
| | 03:21 | So this we call it Rib2.
| | 03:24 | We'll just repeat that process
for the other two spine joints.
| | 03:32 | So I'll keep working on this.
| | 03:33 | Let's skip ahead and I'll talk about a
couple of other steps that I take as I
| | 03:36 | build out the skeleton.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Finishing the skeleton| 00:00 | Okay, so I have done some more work
on my skeleton here. Let's just review
| | 00:03 | what I have done so far.
| | 00:04 | So in last video we did the spine and the ribs.
| | 00:07 | I have also added in the arms,
which are very similar to the legs.
| | 00:10 | They just branch out from the
spine joints that they are closest to.
| | 00:13 | Let's take a closer look at the head here.
| | 00:16 | So I have added in a joint for the neck and
let's take a look at that in the Outliner.
| | 00:28 | So we have got a joint for the neck
coming out of that last spine joint and have
| | 00:32 | one central joint for the head and
after the head is going to come the joints
| | 00:38 | for the antennas, the joints for
the eyes and the joints for the mouth.
| | 00:42 | So that way, as we rotate the neck all
of that stuff will kind of move in unison.
| | 00:46 | So the joints for the eyes are pretty
simple, coming off of that head joint--
| | 00:53 | Let's switch to the Top view. This is a
little bit easier to see. Let me click here.
| | 01:03 | So I am just going to select that eye
joint. And coming off the head joint I have
| | 01:12 | one joint that's centered in the
sphere that makes the eyeball and then one
| | 01:17 | joint that comes actually to the pupil
of the eye, and that's just going to make
| | 01:21 | it easy to rotate around that centered
joint so that the eye can kind of move in
| | 01:26 | its socket and maybe tract back and
forth like it's looking at something.
| | 01:29 | Now the mouth, this is kind
of an interesting setup too.
| | 01:31 | Let me maximize this Perspective view
here just by hitting Spacebar and I am
| | 01:40 | actually going to turn off my geometry
layer so we can look a little bit more
| | 01:44 | closely just at the skeleton.
| | 01:47 | So coming off of this central head
joint here, I have one joint that's going to
| | 01:52 | control the upper jaw and then one
joint that kind of builds out to the lip,
| | 01:58 | a joint for the lower jaw, and again for
the lower lip, and then I also have one
| | 02:02 | fore the corner of the mouth and I am
going to mirror that to work on the other
| | 02:05 | side of the mouth as well.
| | 02:06 | We are a little bit constrained with
the way that we can set up our skeleton
| | 02:11 | because we are bringing this into Unity.
| | 02:13 | Unity only supports bone animations,
whereas with other applications in Maya you
| | 02:17 | can use different techniques like
blend shapes to do a mouth for example.
| | 02:21 | So this is one technique that gives
us a little bit more control over the
| | 02:24 | mouth of the character.
| | 02:28 | And finally just the antenna, this is
pretty similar to one of leg or the arm joints.
| | 02:32 | This is just going to let the antennas
kind of flop back and forth maybe as he
| | 02:35 | jumps up and down or something like that.
| | 02:41 | So we've got everything set up for this
left side of the body and we need to go
| | 02:45 | ahead and mirror these
joints over to the opposite side.
| | 02:48 | So I am going to go ahead and switch to
the front view just by hitting Spacebar
| | 02:57 | and I will go ahead and
start mirroring these joints.
| | 02:59 | So I am going to select this left hip joint
and let's find that in the Outliner as well.
| | 03:06 | Okay, so I have got the left hip joint and
I want to mirror that to the opposite side.
| | 03:10 | So I am going to go to the
Skeleton menu > Mirror Joint with options.
| | 03:15 | So we want to mirror this across the YZ plane.
| | 03:20 | So if we think about this, let's switch
to Prospective view so I can demonstrate
| | 03:24 | this a little more clearly.
| | 03:25 | So if we think about the way that this
character is oriented, we have got the
| | 03:31 | y-axis coming up and down here
and the z-axis coming parallel.
| | 03:35 | So we would want the plane
that's formed by the y and z axis.
| | 03:38 | That's kind of the plane of symmetry.
| | 03:40 | So we want to select that to Mirror
across and we can also have Maya help us out
| | 03:46 | with our naming conventions here.
| | 03:48 | So we can have basically Maya perform
a Search and Replace with the names.
| | 03:52 | So I could have it search for
that _L and just replace it with _R.
| | 03:58 | So that way I will keep all the same
hip, knee, ankle and so forth for both
| | 04:02 | sides of the skeleton.
| | 04:03 | So let me just select that hip
again and mirror across the YZ plane.
| | 04:12 | So go ahead and do that same
operation for all the rest of the symmetrical
| | 04:15 | joints, so the arms, this one side of
the mouth, and then the antenna is already
| | 04:20 | done and that's pretty much for the skeleton.
| | 04:24 | Really the key to being successful
when building a skeleton is thinking
| | 04:27 | ahead for how the character is going
to move and also how its geometry is going to deform.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rigging the legs and feet| 00:00 | So we have got our skeleton set up.
| | 00:01 | To help us in the process of animating,
I'd like to build in some controls that
| | 00:06 | make different parts of the skeleton
easier to move and easier to select.
| | 00:10 | So I am just going to zoom in here on
the leg and right now I can click on
| | 00:14 | these individual joints and I can rotate
these around, so I am just going to use
| | 00:18 | the Rotate tool here.
| | 00:19 | So I can rotate these to pose
them and I can go through each one.
| | 00:24 | That's a little tedious and that's kind of
more work than I'd like to do just for the legs.
| | 00:28 | So let's take a look at one easy way that
can help posing our legs go little bit easier.
| | 00:32 | So I am just going to undo those rotations.
| | 00:36 | So what I like to use for the
legs is called an IK handle.
| | 00:39 | So to make an IK handle, I can go up to
Skeleton > IK Handle tool with options.
| | 00:44 | I am going to make an IK handle.
| | 00:46 | I want to make sure that I am using
the ikRPsolver, not the ikSCsolver.
| | 00:52 | So when we bring this into Unity,
Unity is going to do some calculations
| | 00:56 | based on any IK handles we have and it can
only do those calculations with the ikRPsolver.
| | 01:01 | So we'll just make sure that's set and
to make an IK handle, we will start with
| | 01:06 | the base joint of the leg, so that's the hip.
| | 01:08 | Just click on the hip and at the ankle.
| | 01:12 | And now if I go to the Move tool,
I can move this IK handle around.
| | 01:17 | It's going to automatically handle the
rotations in the joints along the IK handle.
| | 01:21 | Let me just undo that.
| | 01:24 | So that's the way to move the leg a
little bit more naturally, and that's going
| | 01:28 | to be helpful as we go through
and pose and animate our character.
| | 01:30 | Now another thing I like to do is build
in some controls using NURBS curves that
| | 01:35 | make a little bit easier to access
the different joints in the skeleton.
| | 01:38 | So you can see some of these are kind
of buried here beneath the geometry of a character,
| | 01:43 | so it's going to kind of
hard sometimes to click and access each of
| | 01:45 | these joints, and so let me just show you
an example of that with this IK handle here.
| | 01:49 | So we'll deselect that and I am just
going to create just a simple NURBS circle.
| | 01:54 | So go to Create > NURBS Primitives > Circle
and I will just draw this anywhere for now.
| | 02:01 | That's fine.
| | 02:01 | Let me pull up my Outliner, so go to
Window > Outliner, and I'll look at my
| | 02:08 | ikHandle and I will just parent it by
middle mouse clicking and dragging on
| | 02:13 | to the nurbsCircle.
| | 02:14 | So now if I want to move that IK handle
around I can select that NURBS circle and
| | 02:19 | move that IK handle around since it's parented.
| | 02:21 | That way I don't have to try to zoom in
and click right on the little IK hndle.
| | 02:26 | I can just click on the circle.
| | 02:28 | So that's a much more convenient way to
select different parts of my skeleton.
| | 02:31 | So I can just delete that circle and I
have actually got some pre-built NURBS
| | 02:38 | curves that I can import into my scene.
| | 02:42 | So rigging-feet-controls, I
am just going to import that.
| | 02:49 | So I have got some curves here that I
will use to set up for controlling the
| | 02:53 | different joints in my feet and my legs.
| | 02:57 | So just like we did with the joints
in the skeleton I am going to try to
| | 02:59 | keep consistent naming conventions with all
of my IK handles and my NURBS curves controls.
| | 03:05 | So this I am going to title ikHandle_Foot_, left
and again this is just to help me keep organized.
| | 03:14 | It really does help out down the line.
| | 03:16 | So I would really encourage you to
do this. And let's took a look at
| | 03:18 | these control curves.
| | 03:20 | So I have the main foot control, so that's
this circle here in the back and that's
| | 03:25 | going to control also the TOE and the HEEL.
| | 03:30 | So anytime I want to control the
foot I can just grab that NURBS circle.
| | 03:34 | So right now if I go to move this around,
nothing is going to happen because I
| | 03:38 | don't have these NURBS curves parented
or constrained to any of these joints.
| | 03:42 | So the first thing I can do is just grab
this IK handle that I created and middle
| | 03:48 | mouse click and drag onto the foot left control.
| | 03:51 | So now when I select that foot left I
can move the whole foot up and down.
| | 03:55 | Now I also want to build-in some
controls to allow the foot and the toe to bend
| | 04:02 | as this character walks or jumps or whatever.
| | 04:05 | So I am going to add a couple more
IK handles, so I will do one leading from the
| | 04:12 | ankle to the ball of the foot.
| | 04:14 | I will title that ikHandle_Ball_, left.
| | 04:22 | Then another from the ball to the toe
and I will call that ikHandle_Toe_, left.
| | 04:33 | Okay, so my Toe IK handle I'm
going to parent to the Toe control.
| | 04:39 | Now when I select this control,
I can rotate that toe joint.
| | 04:47 | So if I wanted to make the character tap
his toe or if he was bending to kind of
| | 04:51 | push off of this foot and walk or
run cycle that would be really easy.
| | 04:55 | One thing to note is that I have set
the reference point for rotation directly
| | 05:00 | underneath this ball of the foot
since that's really where it's going to be
| | 05:03 | doing those rotations from.
| | 05:06 | And if I wanted to adjust that, I
could just hold down the D key and I could
| | 05:09 | just kind of drag that around.
| | 05:10 | So basically it's just
directly under that ball joint.
| | 05:13 | Then the Ball IK handle, we are just
going to parent to the FOOT control, because
| | 05:22 | really we just want to kind of
keep it along with that ankle.
| | 05:25 | So now let's try this again.
| | 05:26 | As I move this around, it should move
the whole foot and then if we wanted to
| | 05:31 | make that bend we could have control
over each of those elements as opposed to
| | 05:35 | just kind of flopping around as we move it.
| | 05:36 | So let's take a look at the Heel
control and you will notice that the reference
| | 05:42 | point for the heel control is all the
way up here, so if I go to rotate that heel,
| | 05:46 | it's rotating around the ball of
the foot and that's actually going to be
| | 05:50 | good for our purposes since we could
use this to kind of bend the foot forward.
| | 05:54 | Again, if he is in the point of a
walk or a run cycle where he is sort of
| | 05:57 | pushing off of that toe, we are going
to want to bend the whole foot kind of
| | 06:00 | forward, have the heel come up.
| | 06:02 | So I am actually going to find that
IK handle for the foot and parent that to the heel.
| | 06:09 | So now when I go to rotate,
| | 06:12 | I can rotate that whole
heel over the ball of the foot.
| | 06:16 | So let me zoom out here and
we will show one final control.
| | 06:22 | And I am just going to grab the main
FOOT control here and use the Move tool to
| | 06:27 | move this up and down.
| | 06:28 | So you will notice as we go up, that
knee kind of goes outward a little bit
| | 06:37 | more than I would like it to, so we
can actually control that which is great.
| | 06:39 | So let me undo my movement.
| | 06:44 | We can control that with what's
called a pole vector constraint.
| | 06:47 | So I am going to use this square here
that's in front of the knee and then I am
| | 06:51 | going to find the FOOT IK handle.
| | 06:55 | I am going to Ctrl+Select.
| | 06:58 | So I first selected the square and then
I selected the IK handle that we did at
| | 07:03 | the ankle and go up here to the
Constrain menu and select Pole Vector.
| | 07:10 | So when we want to move this knee
around, we can grab this square and that's
| | 07:18 | actually going to control the direction
of the knee, so we can kind of make his
| | 07:21 | knee move in and out as we need to.
| | 07:23 | Okay, and as you are setting up controls,
one more important thing to look at,
| | 07:32 | let me bring up the Channel Box here.
| | 07:33 | It's really helpful to start
all of your NURBS curves at 0.
| | 07:39 | So as I draw a NURBS curve, let me just
draw one out real quick and I will show you.
| | 07:46 | So let's say I wanted to add another NURBS
curve here for some other part of the foot.
| | 07:50 | You will notice here that there are
some Translate X, and Translate Y, and
| | 07:53 | Translate Z properties for this circle now.
| | 07:56 | Let's say that I wanted to get all of
these back into their original poses.
| | 08:00 | With these curves, it's easy because
they are centered at 0 in their starting points.
| | 08:05 | This curve not so much because
it's got all these just random numbers.
| | 08:09 | So before I do any parenting or
constraining what I like to do is go to Modify
| | 08:14 | > Freeze Transformations, and that's
going to kind of freeze the translate
| | 08:17 | properties of any of the NURBS
controls and their starting points and that
| | 08:21 | makes it easy to go back to the original
pose, just by zeroing out all of these controls.
| | 08:27 | Okay, so the setup is going to be
the same on the opposite foot and leg.
| | 08:31 | in the next video we'll look at
rigging the spine and the torso.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rigging the torso| 00:00 | So I went ahead and did the
controls for the other leg and foot.
| | 00:03 | I also created a layer called Controls
that I'm just placing all of my NURBS
| | 00:07 | curves and so that way if I need to,
I can just toggle those on and off.
| | 00:13 | So let's move onto the controls for the spine.
| | 00:16 | Now, we think about the way the spine
wants to move, the character would like
| | 00:19 | to be able to bend, so let's say he is
bending over to get something, but also to twist.
| | 00:25 | So a good way to set up controls
for the spine are to use a couple of
| | 00:30 | different constraints.
| | 00:31 | So let's just get some
curves in here to start with.
| | 00:33 | I'm going to go to import the torso controls.
| | 00:38 | Let's go ahead and switch
off my Geometry layer here.
| | 00:44 | Let's look from a Side view.
| | 00:46 | So basically, I just have these four
NURBS rectangles and I'll just snap them
| | 00:56 | right to each spine joint and then
rotate it, so that each rectangle lines up
| | 01:01 | with the rib joint of the
corresponding spine joint.
| | 01:04 | So let's switch back to Perspective.
| | 01:07 | To set up these controls, we'll
use two different constraints:
| | 01:12 | a Point Constraint and an Orient Constraint.
| | 01:14 | So that will allow us to rotate the
spine and also move it around if we need to.
| | 01:19 | So let's just set up this first one.
| | 01:21 | I'm going to select this control.
| | 01:23 | I'll bring up my Outliner as I'm doing this.
| | 01:28 | So this is the Hips control.
| | 01:29 | I want to use this to control the
root joint, because that's again like
| | 01:35 | the character's pelvis.
| | 01:36 | So I'll Shift+Select root joint, and
I'll go to Constrain > Point, with options,
| | 01:45 | and I just want to make sure
that I check Maintain offset.
| | 01:48 | So we'll add a Point Constraint and
I'll also add an Orient Constraint.
| | 01:53 | So I'll go to Constrain > Orient with
Options and make sure Maintain offset is checked.
| | 01:59 | We want to maintain the offset so that
the control curves stay in the same place
| | 02:04 | relative to the bones that they're controlling.
| | 02:08 | Okay, so let's see how that behaves.
| | 02:10 | I'm just going to select this Hips
control and let's bring up the Move tool.
| | 02:14 | So now I can move the whole hips
up, and down. I can also rotate.
| | 02:22 | So I am going to rotate
side to side, front to back.
| | 02:32 | I'm just going to go through that
same operation for the rest of the hips.
| | 02:35 | So I'm selecting each of the controls,
Shift+Selecting the spine joint, doing a
| | 02:42 | Point Constraint and then Orient Constraint.
| | 02:45 | So same thing for SPINE_2.
| | 02:51 | Constrain > Point, Constrain >
Orient, and same thing for SPINE_3.
| | 03:03 | One last thing is to look at
the hierarchy of the controls.
| | 03:06 | So if you think about the way that the
hierarchy of the skeleton works, we start
| | 03:10 | with root, we go up to SPINE_1,
up to SPINE_2, up to SPINE_3.
| | 03:14 | So that hierarchy should kind
of be mirrored in the controls.
| | 03:17 | So I'm going to parent SPINE_3 to
SPINE_2, SPINE_2 to SPINE_1, SPINE_1 to HIPS.
| | 03:28 | So this way, now, when I grab the hips,
all of these other controls should come
| | 03:31 | along with it, and same thing if I rotate.
| | 03:39 | But I can still go in and select
individual controls as I need to.
| | 03:43 | So that's how we set up controls for the spine.
| | 03:45 | In the next couple of videos
we'll look at the arms and the head.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rigging the arms and hands| 00:00 | So we're all set with the spine. Let's
take a look at the arms and the hands.
| | 00:04 | So I'm going to go ahead and import some controls.
| | 00:15 | So you can see we got a control
for each shoulder, elbow, and wrist.
| | 00:23 | You can see those here in the Outliner.
For these controls, it's very simple.
| | 00:27 | I'm just using one constraint
and that is an Orient Constraint.
| | 00:31 | So very similar to how we setup the
spine. I'm just going to first select the
| | 00:34 | Ctrl, then Shift select the
joint, and do Constrain > Orient.
| | 00:42 | Let's just double check and
make sure maintain offset is set.
| | 00:46 | That's just going to keep the position of
the controls relative to the joint static.
| | 00:50 | It's not going to move the control accidentally.
| | 00:54 | Same for the elbow, Constrain > Orient,
and same for the Wrist, Constrain > Orient.
| | 01:07 | And in the Outliner here, I'm just going
to set the Hierarchy of those controls,
| | 01:11 | so the wrists will be parented to the elbow.
| | 01:15 | The elbow we will parent to the shoulder.
| | 01:20 | So now when we select the shoulder, we
should be able to rotate that arm around,
| | 01:28 | same thing with the elbow and wrist.
| | 01:33 | Okay, and that process is exactly the
same for all the rest of the arms.
| | 01:36 | Let's take a look at the hands now.
So import some controls for the hands, and I'll
| | 01:41 | just zoom in a little bit here. So
just like we did for the spine, we'll do a
| | 01:56 | point and an orient constraint
for each one of these joints.
| | 02:00 | I've got a control for the finger and
control for the finger joint, same thing
| | 02:09 | for the thumb. So let's select the
Ctrl, Shift select the joint, and then
| | 02:17 | Constrain > Point, and again, I'm just
going to make sure Maintain offset is
| | 02:22 | selected, and Constrain > Orient,
with Maintain offset selected.
| | 02:37 | And same exact process for all
the rest of the hand controls.
| | 02:42 | Constrain > Point, Constrain > Orient,
Constrain > Point, Constrain > Orient,
| | 02:53 | and now I'll look at the Hierarchy.
| | 02:54 | So this FINGER_1 should
parent to the finger base.
| | 03:03 | So now if I select the base, I
should be able to rotate around and if I
| | 03:09 | select both, I'll bring back my Rotate tool,
it should be able to kind of curl that hand in.
| | 03:21 | Same thing for the thumb, so that outer thumb
joint should parent to the base of the thumb.
| | 03:27 | Okay, so I'm going to keep working on
the rest of the arms and hands, but again,
| | 03:32 | the process is exactly the
same for every single one.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rigging the face and head| 00:00 | So I have some more work off-screen
finishing up the controls for the arms.
| | 00:03 | Let's go ahead and work on
the head for a little bit.
| | 00:05 | So I will set up controls for the mouth,
the eyes, the antenna, and one overall
| | 00:10 | control that will move the whole head around.
| | 00:12 | So go ahead and import some controls.
| | 00:14 | I will just bring up my Outliner so go
to Window > Outliner and let's take a
| | 00:25 | look at this main head control here.
| | 00:27 | So this is what I used to
rotate the entire head around.
| | 00:33 | So I am going to
constrain this to that neck joint.
| | 00:42 | So, again I just selected the head
control, Shift+Select the neck joint, and
| | 00:50 | we will do a Point Constrain
and an Orient Constraint.
| | 00:53 | So I am going up to
Constrain > Point, with options.
| | 00:57 | Make sure Maintain Offset is checked
to keep the orientation of the controls
| | 01:00 | static and click Add and Constrain >
Orient. Again let's make sure Maintian
| | 01:07 | Offset is selected and click Add.
| | 01:09 | So now when I select this head
control I can bring up the Rotate tool and I
| | 01:14 | should be able to rotate the
entire head around the neck.
| | 01:17 | Okay, that looks good!
Let's move onto the eyes.
| | 01:25 | So our eye joints here, we have this
central one, which is located in the center
| | 01:28 | of the sphere that forms each eyeball
and then this outer one which is located
| | 01:33 | basically over the pupil of the eye.
| | 01:35 | So to set up motion for this I am going
to make an IK handle that goes from the
| | 01:39 | center of the eyeball out to the pupil.
| | 01:42 | So I go to Skeleton > IK Handle Tool,
start at the centre of the eyeball, and
| | 01:48 | now it's the pupil.
| | 01:50 | In my Outliner I will just title that
ikHandle_Eye_, left and that gets parented to
| | 01:59 | the eye left control, which
is this circle right here.
| | 02:03 | So if I select that and use the Move
tool I should be able to move that around.
| | 02:10 | So what that's going to do is rotate
the sphere around its center point, so
| | 02:14 | that will allow me to have the eyes track
back and forth or follow something on screen.
| | 02:18 | I will do the same thing for the opposite side.
| | 02:21 | So IK handle from the center of the
eyeball to the pupil and that gets parented
| | 02:33 | to the eye right control.
| | 02:36 | Now I also want a way to be able to
select both eyeballs at once just in case I
| | 02:41 | want them to be looking at something
on screen or just not going cross-eyed.
| | 02:45 | So I have set up just a straight NURBS
curve here from main EYES control and I
| | 02:50 | am going to parent both the EYE_L and
the EYE_R control to that EYES control.
| | 02:58 | And then finally, since I want to
basically have those eye controls move
| | 03:03 | along with any rotations that the
head make, I will go ahead and parent that
| | 03:07 | EYES control to HEAD.
| | 03:09 | So now when I go to make rotations
with the HEAD, those EYE controls will
| | 03:14 | follow along with it.
| | 03:15 | Okay, let's take a look at the antenna.
| | 03:23 | So for each one of these antenna controls
this is actually very similar to the spine.
| | 03:27 | I am just going to do Point and
an Orient Constrain reach control.
| | 03:31 | So I will select the base ANTENNA
control and Shift+Select the base antenna joint
| | 03:35 | and Constrain > Point, Constrain >
Orient. Same thing for these other two.
| | 03:53 | The right hand side is exactly the same so
I will leave that for you to do offscreen.
| | 04:01 | Now, let's move on to the mouth.
| | 04:04 | So mouth controls are going to be set up
very similar to how we structure the eyes.
| | 04:07 | So we are just doing single joint IK
handles from the inner jaw to the outer jaw.
| | 04:13 | So set up Skeleton > IK Handle Tool.
Drom the inner jaw to the outer jaw.
| | 04:25 | And this one is going to be called ikHandle_Jaw_
L and that gets parented to the JAW_L control.
| | 04:36 | And the process is exactly the same
for all the rest of the JAW controls.
| | 04:39 | So IK Handle tool, from inner to outer jaw.
| | 04:46 | This is ikHandle_Jaw_Top and
that gets parented to JAW_TOP.
| | 04:57 | So I will spend some more time
finishing up the antenna and the rest of the jaw
| | 05:00 | controls but that's pretty much
it as far as rigging controls.
| | 05:03 | In the next video we will just do a
couple of cleanup tips before we move on to animation.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Rigging wrap-up| 00:00 | So we have got all our controls in
place and we just need to go through of a
| | 00:03 | couple of more steps to kind
of clean things up a little bit.
| | 00:06 | I am going to take a look in the
Outliner here and just make sure all of my
| | 00:09 | hierarchy is correct.
| | 00:11 | Let's just start with the
head and work our way down.
| | 00:13 | So my Head control. Right now
my Eyes are parented to the Head.
| | 00:17 | I also want to make sure that all
other controls that are located on the head
| | 00:20 | are parented to the head.
| | 00:21 | So the Antena, both Antennas and all the
Jaw controls, actually parented to the head.
| | 00:27 | Now look at these different
Shoulder controls. It looks good.
| | 00:46 | So just take a look at our Spine controls,
which lead to the controls for the upper arms.
| | 00:53 | To the Left and the Right upper
Shoulder should both be parented to Spine_3.
| | 01:00 | Then the lower arm and hand controls
should get parented to Spine_1 and then
| | 01:07 | finally the Head controls
should also get parented to Spine_3.
| | 01:12 | It's looking good and then we will
just make one additional control.
| | 01:21 | So we go to Create > NURBS Primitives
> Circle, and I just want a make a big
| | 01:27 | circle kind of around the base of the
character that I can use to just pick up
| | 01:31 | and control everything all at once.
| | 01:33 | So I am going to hold down X to snap
to grid here and just click-and-drag and
| | 01:38 | that looks just fine.
| | 01:39 | So in my Outliner, I am going
to title this one, MAIN_CONTROL.
| | 01:48 | Then all of my controls will
get parented to MAIN_CONTROL.
| | 01:52 | So now if I just want a move the
entire character around I can just
| | 01:56 | click-and-drag him around.
| | 02:01 | I also want to make sure that all of
my controls are in the controls layer.
| | 02:07 | So now I can turn on and off the
controls and that can just help visually make
| | 02:13 | things look little bit less messy.
| | 02:14 | I am going to turn my geometry back on.
| | 02:17 | So all our controls are set up now and
in the next video we'll get ready to bind
| | 02:22 | the skeleton to the actual
geometry so you can post the character.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Skin binding and weight painting| 00:00 | So we've got all our controls set up
on our skeleton and we're at a point now
| | 00:04 | where we need to bind the
skeleton to the character's geometry.
| | 00:07 | And that's going to allow the
position of the skeleton to determine the
| | 00:11 | position of the geometry.
| | 00:13 | So we'll do this using a
process called smooth bind.
| | 00:15 | And smooth bind lets each bone in
the skeleton affect vertices in the
| | 00:21 | character's geometry.
| | 00:23 | So let's get this set up in the Outliner here.
| | 00:25 | I'm just going to select my
skeleton and Shift+Select my geometry.
| | 00:30 | Then under the Skin menu, I'll go to
Bind Skin > Smooth Bind, with options.
| | 00:36 | So I want to bind to the Joint hierarchy
and I want to set this Max influences to 3.
| | 00:42 | So what that means is for any vertex in
the character's geometry, only three of
| | 00:47 | the bones will be able to control it.
| | 00:49 | And that's just going to help to
simplify our process as we go through and
| | 00:52 | determine which bones affect
which parts of the geometry.
| | 00:55 | So I'll go ahead and click Bind Skin.
| | 00:57 | And now if I go ahead and move my
skeleton around, I should see that the
| | 01:01 | geometry is moving along with it.
| | 01:03 | So let me select this left foot control and
let's go ahead and turn off X-Ray Shading.
| | 01:08 | So I'll click Shading and uncheck X-Ray.
| | 01:10 | So now, as I bring this foot control up,
I can see that the character's geometry
| | 01:14 | is moving along with the skeleton.
| | 01:16 | I can also see it's
moving in kind of a weird way.
| | 01:18 | So you see as I move the foot up, parts
of this wing and the lower abdomen are
| | 01:22 | moving along with it.
| | 01:23 | So we need to go through and kind of
do some fine-tuning to tell Maya which
| | 01:27 | bones affect which parts of the geometry.
| | 01:29 | So I'm just going to undo that movement there.
| | 01:31 | So to edit the way that the skeleton
influences the geometry, I'm going to use
| | 01:35 | the Paint Skin Weights tool.
| | 01:37 | So I'll select my character's geometry.
| | 01:39 | I'm going to go up to Skin > Edit Smooth
Skin > Paint Skin Weights Tool, with options.
| | 01:46 | So if you notice when I brought up
the Paint Skin Weights tool, my shading
| | 01:50 | changed on my character.
| | 01:51 | So the Paint Skin Weights tool is
going to give me a visual indication of the
| | 01:56 | influence for each joint
to the character's geometry.
| | 01:59 | So let's just expand this a little bit here.
| | 02:04 | So in my tool settings for the Paint
Skin Weights tool, I'll see the entire
| | 02:08 | hierarchy of my character's skeleton.
| | 02:10 | So this is another reason why the
naming conventions are so important.
| | 02:14 | So I know exactly which bones I'm
dealing with here and that's just going to
| | 02:17 | make it so much easier as I go
through and adjust the weights.
| | 02:20 | So right now, I've got the root
bone selected. Let's go down.
| | 02:23 | I want to look at the left knee.
| | 02:26 | And I'll zoom in a here a
little bit on the left knee.
| | 02:30 | So the visual that I'm getting with the
Paint Skin Weights tool is the wider the
| | 02:34 | geometry is the more influence the
current bone has over that geometry.
| | 02:38 | So I can see this part right here,
the knee joint has a lot of influence
| | 02:42 | over this geometry.
| | 02:43 | And then I can see up here on this
kind of wingtip is a little bit gray.
| | 02:47 | So that would make sense because as we
were lifting that leg up and down, that
| | 02:50 | wingtip is kind of moving around.
| | 02:52 | So there's a little bit of influence
from the left knee joint to this wingtip.
| | 02:56 | So we want to go ahead and get rid of that.
| | 02:59 | In my Paint Skin Weights tool
settings, I want the Mode set on Paint.
| | 03:05 | I want the Value set on 0.
| | 03:07 | So for each joint in the skeleton,
I'll have the option of a weight from 0 to 1.
| | 03:14 | Now right now, I want to get rid of
all of the weighting from that left knee
| | 03:19 | that's applied right now
to this bottom of the wing.
| | 03:22 | So I'm just going to set this value
to 0, so essentially I'm erasing the
| | 03:29 | influence from that left knee
to this area of the geometry.
| | 03:32 | And right now my Brush Size is very small,
so I'm going to increase this a little bit.
| | 03:36 | I'm just going to hold down the B key
and click with my left mouse button and
| | 03:40 | drag and just increase
that Brush Size a little bit.
| | 03:42 | And I'll just go ahead and click and I'm just
kind of paint over that area of the wingtip.
| | 03:48 | You can see as I do that, the
color changes from gray to black.
| | 03:53 | So that's a visual indication that I'm
removing the influence from that left
| | 03:58 | knee joint on this part of the geometry.
| | 04:04 | And I can see there's even some on
the back here too, so I'll just spend a
| | 04:06 | little time painting over this geometry.
| | 04:09 | Let's take a look and see how that worked.
| | 04:11 | So now, as I select that left foot
control again and use my Move tool to move
| | 04:18 | it up and down, I should get less distortion.
| | 04:20 | There's still a little bit, and I think
that's probably coming from some on the
| | 04:23 | hip joint and some on the ankle joint,
so I need to go through each individual
| | 04:27 | joint and make sure that it's
influencing the geometry in the correct way.
| | 04:32 | And that's going to take a little
bit of time, but it's not too bad.
| | 04:35 | This is another point in our process
where we can take advantage of symmetry.
| | 04:39 | So really all we need to take care of
painting skin weights for one side of
| | 04:43 | model and later on I can mirror those over.
| | 04:46 | And I can do that using Skin > Edit
Smooth Skin > Mirror Skin Weights.
| | 04:52 | I want to actually do this right now
but I'll just go over the options, so I'll
| | 04:54 | bring up the options for this.
| | 04:56 | And just like when we mirrored the
skeleton, I want to mirror over the Y-Z
| | 04:59 | plane, and I do want Positive to negative.
| | 05:02 | So I'm just going to continue like I've
been through this whole process, working
| | 05:05 | in the positive X direction and
we'll mirror that into negative X.
| | 05:08 | So as I go through the process, I can
mirror as I go or I can mirror at the very end.
| | 05:13 | But the point is I really only have to
focus on one part of the model until I
| | 05:16 | get all my weights painted correctly.
| | 05:18 | So I'm going to spend some time finishing out
the weight painting on the rest of this geometry.
| | 05:23 | In the next video, we'll look at animating.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating in Maya| 00:00 | So I've spend some time painting the
skin weights for my character and I've got
| | 00:03 | pretty much everything deforming
nicely the way that I wanted to.
| | 00:06 | So I'm at a point where I can start
building in some animations to bring into Unity.
| | 00:11 | Now when we work with a game character
in Unity, we don't actually work with the
| | 00:15 | Maya file. We work with a format called FBX.
| | 00:18 | Now luckily there's a way to allow Unity to
automatically export our FBX files for us.
| | 00:24 | So we don't do any kind of exporting
to bring our file into Unity, everything
| | 00:28 | is handled on the backend and we do that in
Maya with a plug-in called the FBX plug-in.
| | 00:33 | So I just want to make sure that my
FBX plugin is installed and activated.
| | 00:37 | So I'm going to go to Window > Setting/
Preferences > Plug-in Manager and I just
| | 00:45 | want to look for this fbxmaya pug-in.
| | 00:47 | I want to make sure it's loaded and
I'll have it Auto load, so every time Maya
| | 00:50 | runs this will load.
| | 00:51 | If you don't have the FBX plug-in you
can get it from the Autodesk website.
| | 00:55 | just grab the plug-in for your version of Maya.
| | 00:57 | I am going to close this out.
| | 00:59 | So we're all to set to have Unity
automatically handle all of the exporting for
| | 01:04 | us to bring our Maya files into Unity.
| | 01:06 | So we first start animating and
I'll just double-check that a couple
| | 01:08 | settings are set correctly.
| | 01:10 | So I'll go up to Window > Settings/
Preferences > Preferences and under Settings
| | 01:17 | I want to make sure that Maya working
units for time are 30 frames per second.
| | 01:23 | That's the frame rate that the FBX
plug-in is going to be expecting.
| | 01:27 | So this will make sure that all our
animations transfer at the right rate.
| | 01:31 | If we don't do this, we'll
get a lot of weird jumping.
| | 01:33 | The animations just
won't come through correctly.
| | 01:35 | One other setting I want to look at
under Time slider is my Max Playback Speed
| | 01:40 | and I'll set this to 30 frames per second.
| | 01:44 | So that'll actually play at the rate
that we're going to see in Unity and
| | 01:47 | that'll give me a pretty good
indication what my animations will actually
| | 01:50 | look like in the game.
| | 01:51 | So I'll go ahead and save this and I'll
spend a little time off-screen building
| | 01:55 | in some animation sequences.
| | 01:57 | A couple tips as you're building animations.
| | 01:59 | Unity will automatically import
bone animation. So IK animations and FK
| | 02:04 | animations, that's Inverse Kinematics
and Forward Kinematics animations, will
| | 02:08 | automatically be imported into Unity.
| | 02:10 | Unity won't automatically import blend
shapes and expressions or driven keys.
| | 02:15 | Now that's not to say that you can't
use those techniques in your animations.
| | 02:18 | You'll just have to go through the
extra steps of baking in the keys in Maya
| | 02:22 | before importing into Unity.
| | 02:24 | So the process won't be quite as automated
if they use things other than bone animations.
| | 02:28 | So if you'd like some more tips on
specific techniques for animation I recommend
| | 02:32 | the lynda course Character
Animation Fundamentals with Maya.
| | 02:35 | That's got some great pointer for how to set
up animations if you don't have much experience.
| | 02:40 | So I spent some time setting up a few
different animation cycles for my character.
| | 02:43 | I've got a walk cycle and a run
cycle, a jump cycle, and an idle cycle.
| | 02:49 | So let me just scroll down here.
| | 02:51 | So this is the walk cycle and I have
just got these all kind of laid out
| | 02:54 | sequentially on the timeline.
| | 02:56 | So after the walk cycle comes the run cycle,
then a jump, and then later on an idle cycle.
| | 03:05 | So this is kind of an interesting cycle.
| | 03:07 | It's just got the character moving
just a tiny bit over. I think about a
| | 03:10 | hundred frames or so.
| | 03:11 | That's just going to make a little
bit more lifelike so. As the character's
| | 03:14 | standing around in the video game it'll
be moving a little bit it looks like he's
| | 03:18 | breathing or maybe
shifting his weight a little bit.
| | 03:20 | So that's something that can just add
a little bit more life your character.
| | 03:23 | So I've just built these all into the
time sequence and when we go to import our
| | 03:27 | character into Unity we can specify
which parts of the Times slider correspond
| | 03:33 | to which animations and the FBX
plug-in will automatically import those as
| | 03:37 | separate animations into Unity.
| | 03:39 | So it's another nice feature
working with Unity and the FBX plug-in.
| | 03:43 | So at this point we're ready to move
onto the next chapter and talk about
| | 03:46 | importing our character
and animations into Unity.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
5. Importing into UnityExploring the Unity interface| 00:00 | So let's take a few minutes to get a little
more familiarized with the Unity interface.
| | 00:04 | Hopefully, you have a little bit of
experience with Unity, but if you don't,
| | 00:07 | this will give you a pretty good overview.
| | 00:09 | I'm using just the default demo
project called Angry Bots that comes
| | 00:13 | preinstalled with Unity.
| | 00:14 | Just so we have something to look at here.
| | 00:16 | So let's start off with the Project
panel. This is kind of analogous to your
| | 00:21 | project folder in Maya, so this is
going to hold all of the assets that are
| | 00:24 | used in your game and you can see we have got
these categorized with some subfolders here.
| | 00:29 | So you love things like Scenes,
Scripts, Textures in this folder.
| | 00:33 | This is going to automatically track
the folder called Assets and Finder and
| | 00:38 | it's going to automatically import
anything that you save to that folder.
| | 00:41 | One recommendation when you're
working with files in your Project folder,
| | 00:45 | especially if you're moving things around,
is to do it through Unity as opposed
| | 00:49 | to doing it in Finder.
| | 00:51 | Unity automatically tracks lots of
metadata about the files that you're using in
| | 00:54 | your game and the connections between
those files, and if you're moving things
| | 00:58 | around outside of Unity, sometimes
those connections will get broken.
| | 01:01 | So as much as you can, try to
move things around in Unity.
| | 01:05 | The Scene view, so that's this 3D view
up here, is your interactive editor for
| | 01:09 | the current scene, so here we can
select all of the game objects that are in
| | 01:13 | a current scene. We can move things around,
kind of similar to your 3D views in Maya.
| | 01:19 | Next to that we have the Game view, so
this is actually the rendered interactive
| | 01:24 | view that you'll see when you run the
game, so think of this is kind of the
| | 01:27 | render view in Maya and
that'll show you your end product.
| | 01:32 | Down here we have the Hierarchy and
this is similar to the Outliner in Maya,
| | 01:36 | so this going to show you the
hierarchy of all the game objects that are in
| | 01:40 | your current scene.
| | 01:42 | And just like Maya you can parent game
objects to one another and if we click
| | 01:49 | on any one of these, we can look over
in this window called the Inspector, and
| | 01:53 | think of this as kind of like your
attribute editor or your channel box from
| | 01:56 | Maya and here's where you can adjust
all of the components of a game object, so
| | 02:01 | down here I can adjust the Position,
Rotation, Scale, things like that and other
| | 02:05 | components like Scripts and
physics components like Collider.
| | 02:13 | I can add new game objects to the
hierarchy from the GameObjects menu, so I can
| | 02:18 | create things like
primitive polygon shapes or lights.
| | 02:24 | I can add new components like scripts.
They'll help to process user input and
| | 02:29 | make my game interactive, and just like
Maya, not all of the interfaces visible
| | 02:34 | all the time, so we can bring up a
few other windows. One important one.
| | 02:38 | I'll click on the Window menu and we'll
look at the Animation window, so Unity
| | 02:43 | actually has its own built-in Animation Editor.
| | 02:45 | Again, it's kind of similar to Maya,
where we can use curves to animate
| | 02:48 | properties of different game objects,
and we'll go over this one in a little bit
| | 02:52 | more detail in a later video.
| | 02:54 | If you're brand-new to Unity, I'd
recommend going over some of the tutorial
| | 02:57 | documents that can be found
on Unity site, at unity3d.com.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Importing character and animations into Unity| 00:00 | So now that we are little bit more
familiar with the Unity interface, let's go
| | 00:03 | ahead and open up the project
we created in the first chapter.
| | 00:07 | So I will click on File > Open Project,
and I don't want to save these changes
| | 00:13 | that I made to the default scene.
| | 00:16 | Okay, so we have got our project open.
| | 00:17 | Let's take a look at our assets.
So this is my Maya project.
| | 00:21 | I am just going to expand this here
and I want to scroll down to scenes,
| | 00:30 | Chapter 5, and this is the version of our
character that we are going to import into Unity.
| | 00:34 | So I'll just click on this to bring it
up in the Inspector and before we bring
| | 00:38 | the character into our scene, I
want to set up a few options in this
| | 00:42 | FBXImporter component.
| | 00:45 | So this is going to tell Unity exactly
how to import our character along with
| | 00:50 | its animations into our game project.
| | 00:53 | And really this Animation section is the
one I want to pay the most attention to.
| | 00:57 | So I want to make sure that this
Bake Animations option is selected.
| | 01:02 | This is going to allow Unity to use
that FBX plug-in through Maya to bake all
| | 01:07 | the IK animations and take care
of all exporting automatically.
| | 01:11 | That's going to leave our Maya project
very fluid and we can go back and make
| | 01:14 | changes easily and then Unity will
automatically bring those in and our
| | 01:18 | character will just be ready to go.
| | 01:19 | The Animation Wrap Mode, so we can set
a default way for animations to either
| | 01:24 | loop or stop at the end or
go forwards and backwards.
| | 01:28 | I am just going leave this on default
but let's just look at the options here.
| | 01:31 | So we can have by default every
animation play only Once and stop. We can
| | 01:34 | have it Loop over and over again.
| | 01:37 | PingPong means it plays
forward, then reverse and so on.
| | 01:41 | ClampForever plays once and will look to
a script as though it's playing forever.
| | 01:46 | That one is a little bit more complex.
| | 01:48 | Again, we are just kind of touching on the
basics of getting a character into Unity.
| | 01:52 | Obviously, Unity is a very complex
program. There is a lot more depth that
| | 01:56 | we can go in to that.
| | 01:56 | Unfortunately it's just
beyond the scope of this course.
| | 01:59 | So here under the Split Animations
options, we have the table with animations.
| | 02:05 | So like we talked about in the
previous chapter, I built all of my animations
| | 02:10 | into my Unity character's timeline in
the Maya project, and I am going to tell
| | 02:14 | Unity to split those
animations up into separate components.
| | 02:18 | So let's go ahead and get those set up.
| | 02:19 | I am going to click this little plus icon here.
| | 02:21 | So we will add an animation.
| | 02:23 | By default, it's going to be called idle.
| | 02:26 | And I will use that to set up the idle
animation, which in my Maya project starts
| | 02:30 | on Frame 66 and Ends on Frame 167.
| | 02:34 | And for this one I want to set the
Wrap mode to Loop, because I just want this
| | 02:39 | to loop over and over again.
| | 02:40 | So that way, if the character is
just standing still, that idle animation
| | 02:44 | will always be playing.
| | 02:45 | So he will always have a little
bit of movement and never just be
| | 02:47 | standing completely still.
| | 02:49 | Now this other Loop Option here.
| | 02:51 | This can help out if your animations
aren't perfectly set up for cycles.
| | 02:55 | So if there is a little bit of jump
between the Last frame and the Start frame,
| | 02:58 | Unity will try to smooth out
that transition but I am just going to
| | 03:02 | leave that unchecked for now.
| | 03:05 | So just go ahead and set up, all the rest of
animations that I have built into my Maya file.
| | 03:12 | So the walk animation starts
at Frame 2 Ends at Frame 34.
| | 03:17 | And again, the Wrap Mode on this one, I
want it to loop because if the character
| | 03:21 | is walking, I just want it
to loop over and over again.
| | 03:23 | Then I will do run animation which
starts at Frame 35 and Ends at Frame 51 and I
| | 03:33 | also want this to loop.
| | 03:39 | And finally the jump animation starts
at Frame 53, ends at Frame 55, and this
| | 03:48 | one I just want to play it once.
| | 03:52 | Okay, and that's pretty much it for settings.
| | 03:54 | The Animation Compression you can leave
on the default and just click Apply and
| | 03:58 | Unity will go ahead and use that FBX
plug-in to automatically import your Maya
| | 04:04 | file into the FBX format
that we need to use in Unity.
| | 04:08 | So as far as animations go, this is
a pretty basic set for a character.
| | 04:12 | So idle, walk, run, and jump.
| | 04:14 | Those are kind of just the basics to get a
character to move around and be interactive.
| | 04:17 | Now obviously, your character might be
different, your gameplay might be different.
| | 04:21 | So you might have fewer or many more
animations to import along with your
| | 04:26 | character, but again we just want to
touch on the basics of getting a character
| | 04:30 | with animations into
Unity to make it interactive.
| | 04:33 | Okay, so we've gone ahead and set up
our changes through the FBXImporter.
| | 04:38 | Let's just see what that looks like.
| | 04:39 | So I am going to go down to my Project
panel, just click and drag my character
| | 04:47 | into the Scene Editor.
| | 04:53 | And by doing that I can see I have
also had automatically had that character
| | 04:56 | added to the scene hierarchy. So let me
just select that in a hierarchy and look
| | 05:02 | over here in Inspector, and I can see
this character already has an animation
| | 05:06 | component attached to it and if I
expand the list of Animations, so I can see
| | 05:11 | Unity has automatically separated out
those animations into discrete elements.
| | 05:17 | In the default animation that's
going to play when I run the game is just
| | 05:21 | the idle animation.
| | 05:22 | So let me make some adjustments to the
camera here, so I can make sure that my
| | 05:25 | character will be visible.
| | 05:27 | So I just kind of move and rotate this around.
| | 05:34 | Okay, and let's just switch to
Game view and see how that looks.
| | 05:37 | When I hit Play here to preview
the game rendering, I should see the
| | 05:40 | character's idle animation.
| | 05:42 | That looks pretty good.
| | 05:44 | We will go through some steps in
the next video to actually make our
| | 05:47 | character interactive.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling animations with scripts: Third-person character controller| 00:00 | So in the last video we covered
importing our game character into Unity.
| | 00:04 | So now let's look at some ways so
that we can add interaction to our game
| | 00:08 | character, and basically the way we
do that in Unity is through scripts.
| | 00:11 | So I am going to go ahead and
import some scripts into Unity.
| | 00:15 | These are scripts that
come preinstalled with Unity.
| | 00:17 | So this is part of the standard
assets package that you should have with
| | 00:20 | your install of Unity.
| | 00:21 | So I am just going to go up to Assets
> Import Package and I want to import
| | 00:27 | this Character Controller package. So
I just want to leave all these selected.
| | 00:34 | Just go ahead and click Import.
Okay and then when I look in my Project
| | 00:38 | folder, we should see this Standard
Assets folder and I can expand that down.
| | 00:47 | And there is a couple prefabricated
game characters in here that we can play
| | 00:52 | with too, if you would like.
| | 00:53 | But what I want to look forward down
here is this Sources, Scripts folder.
| | 00:56 | This has a couple of pre-made scripts that
are going to work to allow us to make our
| | 01:01 | character interactive, so it can
move around and respond to user input.
| | 01:05 | So we'll be going to looking at this
ThirdPersonController script in this video.
| | 01:10 | And if I click on that I can
get a preview of the actual text.
| | 01:13 | Now there are many ways in Unity
to make a script that acts as a
| | 01:17 | Character controller.
| | 01:18 | So you can even write your own, a lot
of people do it. Unfortunately, we don't
| | 01:22 | really have the time in this course to
go over the fundamentals of scripting and
| | 01:25 | all the things you need to
know for scripting Unity.
| | 01:27 | But just be aware that there are a lot
of different ways to set up a script that
| | 01:31 | does a similar thing, and if you are
interested, I would recommend checking out
| | 01:34 | some of the Unity scripting tutorials.
| | 01:36 | Okay, so we will just make a couple of
adjustments to our character in the hierarchy.
| | 01:41 | The script that we are going to be
using is actually expecting a model that
| | 01:44 | scaled much smaller.
| | 01:45 | So I am just going to adjust the Scale
in my character's Transform component.
| | 01:50 | And I am going to change it from 1 to 0.
01, so we are just going to temporarily
| | 01:55 | make it a lot smaller and that's
going to actually just be easier than
| | 01:59 | adjusting the script itself.
| | 02:01 | So I have got my character
highlighted in the hierarchy and let's just go
| | 02:04 | back to the Scene view.
| | 02:05 | I am just going to hit F to
automatically zoom-in on that character.
| | 02:13 | Right now, my character is
the only thing in the scene.
| | 02:15 | I actually need to give him sort of a
floor to walk on. Otherwise, once we
| | 02:19 | attach a Character Controller script,
this character will actually have gravity
| | 02:22 | attached to it, so it will
just keep falling into space.
| | 02:24 | So let's go ahead and create a
GameObject, and I will just make a Plane.
| | 02:30 | I'll just bring that down a little bit,
and maybe in the plane's Transform Scale
| | 02:41 | component, I am just going to
make that a little bit bigger.
| | 02:45 | So that will at least give the
character something to walk around on.
| | 02:53 | So to make this character interactive,
I am going to look in that Standard
| | 02:56 | Assets folder that we imported, and I
want to grab this ThirdPersonController
| | 03:00 | script, and all I need to do is just
left mouse click and drag, just drop
| | 03:05 | this right on my game character and I am
going to get this warning about losing Prefab.
| | 03:11 | I am going to go ahead and Continue. It's okay.
| | 03:13 | Basically, this is breaking the
connection between our character model that's
| | 03:16 | in the Project folder and kind of
making a local copy that's just going to be
| | 03:21 | used for this scene.
| | 03:22 | So I will click back in the hierarchy
on our game character and I should see
| | 03:28 | here I have got a couple extra
components that I can see in the Inspector.
| | 03:31 | So I have this Character Controller
and this Third Person Controller. Both of
| | 03:36 | these are scripts that are now
attached to this game character.
| | 03:39 | So I am just going to make a couple of
adjustments here. Let's start by looking
| | 03:42 | at the Character Controller.
| | 03:44 | I'm just going to set some scaling here,
and again, this might be different if
| | 03:49 | your characters are slightly different size.
| | 03:53 | So basically what I'm doing here is
forming sort of a rough shape that will
| | 04:02 | represent the collider of my character.
| | 04:04 | So this is going to kind of flesh out
the rough physical shape and sort of help
| | 04:09 | out with physics calculations
that Unity will do during game play.
| | 04:13 | So now let's move on to this Third Person
Controller script and let me just expand that.
| | 04:18 | What we want to look at
here are these Animation Clips.
| | 04:22 | So we've got the Script asking us for an
Idle Animation, a Walk Animation, a Run
| | 04:27 | Animation, and a Jump Pose.
| | 04:29 | So what I can do is look back to my
Project panel, find that game character file,
| | 04:36 | and I can see here I have got the
animations that I've set up through my FBX
| | 04:39 | Importer, and what I can do is
just click and drag those over.
| | 04:42 | So I am going to set the Idle
Animation for Idle Animation.
| | 04:48 | Walk for the Walk Animation
and so on for Run and Jump.
| | 04:55 | And there are a few other settings
here as far as the Maximum Speed that the
| | 04:58 | character can walk with,
how high it's going to jump.
| | 05:00 | I am just going to leave
these on defaults for now.
| | 05:03 | One additional thing I want to do is
add a light in my scene, so if I switch
| | 05:06 | back to the Game view, let me just
move my camera so I can see. So I want to
| | 05:18 | just place that a little
closer. Let me click here.
| | 05:22 | I will click and rotate.
Let me adjust this.
| | 05:40 | And I will click and drag this.
| | 05:45 | So if we switch to Game view, I can
see my character is very dark and that's
| | 06:00 | because there are no lights in the scene.
| | 06:02 | So I am just going to go ahead and
add a directional light, so I will click
| | 06:06 | GameObject > Create Other > Directional
Light and then that will add this Directional
| | 06:11 | Light to my hierarchy and let's go
ahead and rotate this. Let me zoom in a
| | 06:19 | little here. So I'll just rotate it
so it's kind of shining on our character
| | 06:24 | and if I switch to the Game and I
can see that lighting looks a lot better.
| | 06:27 | So let's go ahead and click Play and we
should see that our character has some interaction.
| | 06:31 | So by clicking the A, W, S, and D keys,
I should be able to make him walk around.
| | 06:36 | So let's go ahead and click Play
and see what that looks like. Okay.
| | 06:39 | So I am clicking W here to walk forward,
S to walk backwards, and I can turn
| | 06:47 | using A & D. And if I hold down Shift, I can
make him run. And I can jump with the spacebar.
| | 07:01 | So those are kind of the basics of
using a script to add interactivity to
| | 07:06 | your game character.
| | 07:07 | In the next video, we will cover
getting the camera to move around and follow
| | 07:11 | the character as he walks and runs around.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Controlling animations with scripts: Third-person camera controller| 00:00 | In the last video we've looked at how
to use a script to access the different
| | 00:04 | animations of our game
character and make it interactive.
| | 00:07 | In this video let's take a look at
another script that we can apply to make the
| | 00:12 | camera follow our
character around as he's moving.
| | 00:15 | Luckily, we have another
pre-built script for that.
| | 00:18 | So in that Character Controller asset
that we imported in the previous video I
| | 00:23 | just want to look for this
Third Person Camera script.
| | 00:26 | I'm going to apply this just in the
same way that we did with the controller
| | 00:29 | script to the game character itself.
| | 00:31 | So I'm just going to left-mouse click-
and-drag and just drop this right over
| | 00:34 | our game character.
| | 00:35 | So now if I click in the hierarchy on
our game character it should be able to
| | 00:40 | scroll down here in the Inspector and
now see this Third Person Camera component
| | 00:45 | that's attached to our character.
| | 00:46 | So the camera script is going to be
looking for which camera we wanted to control.
| | 00:51 | So right now there's just
one camera in our scene.
| | 00:54 | So that's the main camera.
| | 00:56 | So in hierarchy I'll just click on that,
just left-mouse click-and-drag, just
| | 01:00 | drop that right on the
Camera Transform component.
| | 01:04 | Below that we have some settings in
the script for the Distance away from the
| | 01:08 | character we want the camera to be as
well as the Height and some speed settings
| | 01:12 | for how a camera moves and
response to the character's movements.
| | 01:16 | So let's just leave this on a default.
| | 01:17 | I'll go ahead and hit Play
and we'll see how this works.
| | 01:20 | So we can see when I hit Play the
camera actually moved automatically.
| | 01:24 | If I just go ahead and click the W key
and make the character walk, I can do
| | 01:28 | W+Shift to make him run.
| | 01:29 | We can see that the
camera is following him around.
| | 01:32 | Now we can make a couple of adjustments here.
| | 01:34 | One really cool thing about Unity is
that even when the game is rendering we can
| | 01:39 | make changes through the Inspector
and those will update on the fly.
| | 01:41 | So let's just adjust the
Distance and the Height here.
| | 01:45 | So I'll bring the camera little bit
closer, maybe just drop it down a little bit,
| | 01:49 | and I'll increase this Angular
Smooth Lag so that will allow the character
| | 01:55 | to kind of the scene more from the
front and the side as he turns and not
| | 01:59 | always from the back.
| | 02:00 | So just click back in my Game view here.
| | 02:03 | So, now as I move him around I get a
little bit more of a frontal view when he's
| | 02:09 | walking and it's not always
just locked on the back there.
| | 02:11 | Another thing you might notice is the lighting.
| | 02:14 | Remember, in a previous video
we set up the directional lights.
| | 02:17 | The lights always coming from this
side of the scene regardless of where the
| | 02:20 | characters standing,
some scenes that might be okay.
| | 02:23 | In this one, I want to make the
lighting a little bit more even.
| | 02:26 | So I'll stop the rendering right now and
let's take a look back to our Scene view.
| | 02:32 | One little trick I can do is actually
just parent that light to the camera.
| | 02:39 | So in my hierarchy I'll just click on a
directional light and parent it to the camera.
| | 02:43 | So now basically if I select both I can
see so the directional light is facing
| | 02:48 | this way, the camera's also facing this way.
| | 02:50 | So it's kind of like the light is
always going to be perpetually facing the
| | 02:55 | direction that the camera is facing.
| | 02:56 | So let's go ahead and play and we
should see a little bit nicer lighting.
| | 02:59 | That's pretty good.
| | 03:00 | So it's just more even.
| | 03:03 | Again, that may not be
exactly what you want in your scene.
| | 03:05 | So you might do it a little bit
differently, but that should work well for us.
| | 03:08 | Again, I'm just going to click back on
the character here and we will make some
| | 03:17 | adjustments to the Distance and Height.
| | 03:19 | So one thing to note is when you make
changes through the Inspector as the game
| | 03:24 | is rendering, they won't stay permanent.
| | 03:26 | They will only be applied
while the game is rendering.
| | 03:28 | So once we stop the rendering these
changes that I'm making now will disappear.
| | 03:32 | Then maybe let's drop that
Height down a little bit.
| | 03:39 | That looks pretty good.
| | 03:44 | So again I'm just holding down right
now S+Shift to make him run, and A and D
| | 03:48 | will turn him side to
side and Spacebar will jump.
| | 03:52 | So those are just some simple
techniques to control cameras with the script.
| | 03:56 | In the next video we'll look at Unity's
built-in animation interface and how we
| | 04:01 | can make our own animations within Unity.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Making read/write animations using UnityScript Editor| 00:00 | Unity has its own built-in Animation
Editor and it allows you to edit animations.
| | 00:06 | It's actually very similar to the
Animation Editor in Maya. You use curves to edit
| | 00:09 | animations, but it also allows you to
do some really cool things with scripts
| | 00:12 | like activate scripts at
different points through your animation.
| | 00:15 | So let's take a look and we can see a
couple of different techniques to use
| | 00:19 | the Animation Editor.
| | 00:20 | So I'm going to click on Window >
Animation, and that's going to bring up
| | 00:24 | our Animation Editor.
| | 00:25 | Now, right now I have nothing selected in
my Hierarchy so everything is blank here.
| | 00:29 | I'm going to take a look at my game character,
so I'll just click back here to the hierarchy.
| | 00:33 | And if I think about what is
actually animating on my game character--
| | 00:37 | Let me just going to expand to look at
the hierarchy here. The roots, so that's
| | 00:41 | the exoskeleton and that's actually what's
being animated as my character moves around.
| | 00:45 | I'll just select root and switch back
to my Animation Editor, so now I can see
| | 00:51 | that I have root selected I
now have some animation curves here.
| | 00:54 | In my Animation list here, so there is
a list all of the animations that are
| | 00:58 | applied to what I have
currently selected in the Hierarchy.
| | 01:01 | So I can see that idle, walk, run, and
jump animation attached to this component.
| | 01:05 | And if I scrub through in the timeline
here I can play back and forth through
| | 01:10 | that idle animation.
| | 01:12 | Now another thing you might notice is
that in this animation list all of these
| | 01:15 | are labeled Read-Only, and if I tried
to make any edits here in the Animation
| | 01:19 | window I can't select anything.
Everything is kind of grayed-out.
| | 01:22 | So Unity actually prevents you from
directly editing the animations that are
| | 01:27 | attached to your
character as of imports from Maya.
| | 01:30 | That's actually a good thing because if
you were to make edits to the animations
| | 01:34 | here, if you try to open that file
backup in Maya it may be corrupted.
| | 01:37 | So if we want to make changes to the
animations attached to our game character
| | 01:42 | we actually need to make a local copy of
those animations and that will allow us
| | 01:46 | to both read and write to those animations.
| | 01:48 | So let's look at how we can make a
read/write animation for our character.
| | 01:52 | I'll just close out of the Animation
Editor here, then in the Project panel I'll
| | 01:57 | look at our Maya file that is our game
character, and I'll just look at these
| | 02:01 | animation components.
| | 02:02 | So remember in the previous video we
looked at how to set up the FBX Importer to
| | 02:07 | automatically parse out
these separate animations.
| | 02:10 | So I am going to go ahead and make a
local copy of this run animation that we
| | 02:14 | can edit inside of Unity.
| | 02:15 | I'll duplicate this just by hitting
Command+D. Okay, so there is my copy.
| | 02:22 | I'm going to go ahead and rename this.
| | 02:23 | I will just click Return to rename it.
| | 02:25 | I'll name this Run-RW for run read/write.
| | 02:29 | That will just make it easy to
distinguish between this local copy and the
| | 02:34 | read-only copy. And I'll go
ahead and make a folder for this.
| | 02:38 | So I'll go Create > Folder.
| | 02:40 | I call this Animations-RW for read/
write, and just left mouse click and drag
| | 02:47 | into that in Animations folder, and then
I'll just go ahead and move this to the
| | 02:52 | top level of my project directory.
| | 02:54 | Okay, so now I have my local copies of
animations that I can go ahead and edit as I need to.
| | 03:00 | So let's click back to our game
character and in the Inspector take a look at
| | 03:06 | this Animation component.
| | 03:07 | Right now I want to replace that read-only
copy with my read/write copy of the run animation.
| | 03:13 | So I'll just click on this selector
here and just double-click on run-RW, so
| | 03:19 | that will switch out so that we now have the
read/write animation applied to our character.
| | 03:24 | So back in hierarchy we click on root
and bring back the Animation Editor.
| | 03:34 | Now if we select the run read/write
animation I can see the curves and now I can
| | 03:38 | also make edits to those curves.
| | 03:42 | So again I can scrub through.
| | 03:45 | I can select the individual curves.
So this is the rotation in the Y direction
| | 03:49 | and I'll just grab one of these and drag
it way down so we can see how that
| | 03:53 | affects the animation.
| | 03:56 | And from here I can animate any
part of the skeleton that I want.
| | 03:59 | It's a pretty robust animation interface.
So in the next video we'll talk about
| | 04:03 | how we can use our read/write
animation to call and access scripts.
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| Controlling scripts with animation events| 00:00 | In last video, we talked about how
to make local copies of animations for
| | 00:03 | editing inside Unity.
| | 00:05 | In this video, we'll look at setting up
animation events, which allow animations
| | 00:09 | to access the power of scripts by
calling script functions as they play.
| | 00:14 | So let's use this run-read/write animation
that we created in the last video.
| | 00:19 | I'll go ahead and apply that to the
Third Person Controller script which is
| | 00:23 | attached to our game character.
| | 00:25 | So in the hierarchy, I'll
just click on a game character.
| | 00:29 | And down here in this Third Person
Controller script, instead of the read-only
| | 00:36 | run animation, I want to
use this run-RW animation.
| | 00:40 | So I'll just click and drag, just drop that
right on the Third Person Controller script.
| | 00:47 | So now let's set up a script that this
run-RW animation can talk to you as it plays.
| | 00:53 | So in my Project panel, I'll
click on Create > JavaScript.
| | 00:57 | And we'll just title this HelloWorld.
| | 01:02 | And I'll also go ahead and just
create a folder for all my scripts.
| | 01:12 | And I'll just click and
drag to place that in Scripts.
| | 01:17 | So right now this is just a blank
script, so I'll double-click and we can
| | 01:20 | make some edits here.
| | 01:22 | So right now, we have a default
function called the Update function.
| | 01:27 | So that's a function that
automatically comes up in any script and there we
| | 01:30 | could place scripting language to
control things that happen every frame.
| | 01:35 | In this case though, we're just
going to make a very simple function.
| | 01:37 | So I'm just going to type
function and I'll title it Running.
| | 01:43 | And all our function is going to do
is output some text to the console.
| | 01:52 | So the command to do that is Debug.Log
and then we can just type in our message.
| | 01:59 | So I'm just going to have him say "I'm running."
| | 02:05 | So this is about as simple as you
can possibly get with a function.
| | 02:08 | If you don't have much experience with
JavaScripting for Unity, again I would
| | 02:13 | take a look at some of the
documentation. There are some really great
| | 02:15 | tutorials for scripting.
| | 02:16 | And it's actually a lot of fun.
| | 02:17 | You can do some really powerful
things with scripts though Unity.
| | 02:20 | So let's go ahead and save this.
| | 02:22 | And we can quit out of our text editor. Whoops!
| | 02:24 | I'm getting an error down here already.
| | 02:27 | So let me just double-click one more time.
| | 02:30 | I forgot my semicolon here. Okay.
| | 02:35 | So I want to take the script, left-click,
drag over to the hierarchy, and just
| | 02:40 | apply it to our game character.
| | 02:44 | So now let's click on root again and
go in and add an animation event to our
| | 02:50 | read/write animation.
| | 02:51 | So I'll bring up the animation window
by clicking Window > Animation and we'll
| | 02:56 | edit our run-RW animation.
| | 02:59 | So in the timeline here, right
below there's this little track and that
| | 03:03 | holds animation events.
| | 03:04 | So I can drag the time slider out.
Let's say halfway through I want to add an
| | 03:10 | animation event here and I can just
click Add Event, so I've got an event here.
| | 03:15 | And right now, there's no function selected.
| | 03:17 | So basically an animation event is just
going to talk to any of the scripts that
| | 03:21 | are attached to the game
object that you're animating.
| | 03:24 | So to edit this, I can just double-click
and it's going to ask me to pick a function.
| | 03:31 | So right now I get a big list. So
these are all the functions from all the
| | 03:34 | scripts that are attached to
my game character right now.
| | 03:37 | What I want to pick is this Running function.
| | 03:39 | So as this animation plays, when it
hits this point, it's going to call that
| | 03:44 | Running function that we just set up in
our script and it's going to print that
| | 03:48 | text to the console.
| | 03:49 | Okay, so I'll close out of the animation window.
| | 03:55 | And I'll go to Window.
| | 03:57 | It'll bring up the console so we can
actually see the text that we're going
| | 04:01 | to get when we play.
| | 04:02 | And I'll just click this tab here, just
drag it right down to the Project window.
| | 04:07 | So one thing about the Unity interface
is it's really easy to customize, so you
| | 04:11 | can reposition and drag
around windows as you need to.
| | 04:15 | So I'll go ahead and switch to my Game view.
| | 04:16 | Let's go ahead and play.
| | 04:18 | So I'm going to hold down Shift+W and I
should see in the console now my text is
| | 04:25 | appearing as that running
animation plays over and over again.
| | 04:29 | So that's a really simple example of how
to get an animation to talk to a script.
| | 04:33 | Now obviously, you would probably want to
do something more elaborate with your script.
| | 04:37 | You could use it to control other game
objects that are in your scene, maybe
| | 04:42 | turn a light on or off, something like that.
| | 04:44 | Really, the sky is the limit and it's
just a matter of getting familiar with
| | 04:47 | scripting and getting familiar with Unity.
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ConclusionAdditional resources| 00:00 | The techniques we covered in this
course for importing and controlling
| | 00:02 | game characters are just a small fraction of
what you could do in the Unity game engine.
| | 00:07 | There are many other sides of game
development that you can explore through the
| | 00:10 | Unity support community.
| | 00:12 | Connect with Unity developers on the forums
and learn about everything Unity has to offer.
| | 00:16 | Most of all, have fun creating your game!
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