From the course: Maya: Character Rigging

Creating joints - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Character Rigging

Start my 1-month free trial

Creating joints

- [Instructor] Before we actually get down to rigging a character, I want to go through all the major tools that we will be using in the rigging process. I find that understanding these tools a little bit ahead of time helps you to understand the rigging process as we go through it. The first tool we're going to look at is the Joint tool. Now we can find this in one of two places. If we go into the Rigging menu set you'll see under Skeleton we have Create Joints. We also have a Rigging shelf here and that also has a Create Joint tool. So let's go into Skeleton, Create Joints, I'm going to go ahead and open up the options here and we have our Tool Settings. So I'm just going to hit Reset just to make sure that we're all in the same place. Now under Joint Settings we have a lot of different things and these probably won't make sense to you until you start using them. But probably the most important one is the Orientation Settings. So here we have what's called a Primary Axis. Now by default this is the x-axis and that means that the joint is going to be pointed down the x-axis. And this can be important depending upon how you want to rig your characters and so we're just going to go with the default here of X, but I'll show you a little bit more about this as we go through it. So I'm going to go ahead and close this and I've already selected this tool so you can see that my cursor has changed. So I'm going to go out to a four view and let's go ahead and hit Spacebar over our Side view. Now I'm drawing this in an orthographic view just to make sure that the joint chain is flat. So I'm going to left-click on this and that will give me a joint. If I left-click again that gives me a second joint. Now the joints are these circular objects and in between is this kind of tetrahedral shape and typically that's referred to as a bone, but basically it just shows you that these two joints are connected. So if I click again you can see that I'm getting something that looks kind of like a knee and an ankle and then maybe click again to get the toe, so we have say a hip, knee, ankle, and toe. Now once you're done with your joint creation all you have to do is hit Enter and then we can go to Select mode and hop out to a Perspective view. So as you can see, we've got these joints. Now if we go into the Outliner you'll see that the joints are connected hierarchically. So the first one I drew is obviously joint1, joint2 is our knee, three, and four. Now when we drew these joints remember that we drew them so that they were aligned along the x-axis. So if I select one of these joints and go into my Move tool and double-click on it and go into say Object Orientation you will see that the object itself, the joint, is aligned along the x-axis. So in other words, this joint's x-axis is pointed towards the next joint in the chain. So my hip is pointed at my knee, the knee is pointed along X at the ankle, and so on. Now the toe itself is not aligned and that's because each one of these is aligned to the next joint. And in this case there is no next joint, so this one is just aligned to the x-axis of the world. And I'm going to show you how to change that in just a second. Now when you draw these chains there are many times when you'll need to adjust those joints. So, for example, this one maybe I drew that a little bit low or let's say the knee was a little bit off, so I can basically adjust these however I want, and just basically reposition this chain very fluidly. Now when you start to do this you're going to run into a problem. So if I select this joint here you'll see that by moving this knee I did not move the axis of the hip joint. So in other words, the hip is no longer pointed at the knee. And so when I go to rotate this joint it's not going to be aligned properly. And the same goes for the knee. You can see how that's kind of a little bit off from pointing at the ankle. So when you start to draw chains into a character you'll be doing things like adjusting these joints just so they're exactly positioned right and that's going to throw off your orientation of your joints. Now we can fix this very simply by going into Skeleton, Orient Joint. And let's go to the Options here. So Orient Joints really works very simply. If I select the top of the hierarchy it will work its way down the hierarchy and align them to whatever I want. So if I select my Primary Axis as X, make sure I orient the children of the selected joints, and make sure that we have Orient Joint to World toggled off, let's go ahead and hit Apply. Now watch what happens to this. It gets reoriented. So now my X is again pointing at the next joint. But we still have the problem with this end joint and in this case it's the toe. But we want this to still be kind of in-line with everything else. Well, we can fix that very easily by going Orient Joint to World and hitting Apply. And what that does is it just flips it around so that it actually orients the parent. Now I don't know why they called it Orient Joint to World, it really should be orient joint to parent. But it still works. Now there are times when you may want to orient things a little bit differently. Let's say you don't want this along the x-axis, maybe you want it along the y-axis. Well, you can certainly do that. And certain game engines, such as Unreal, prefer to have the joints oriented this way, so it really just depends on the project and the client that you're working for. But you can always hit Apply and align them this way as well. So as you can see, drawing joints is fairly easy, but when you adjust your joints you want to make sure that you reorient them to themselves, as well as the world.

Contents