From the course: Maya: Character Rigging

Setting up the character - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Character Rigging

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Setting up the character

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- [Instructor] Now let's get down to actually rigging the character. Now the character that we're going to use is this little guy and his name is Gary. And when we get a model for rigging, there are a couple of things that we want to do just to make sure that the rigging process goes smoothly. Now you may get a model that is off-center or something like that. And the first thing you want to do is just to get this model, or the geometry, aligned with the world. We want the symmetrical model to be on the zero plane. So if I hop out to, say, a front view, I just want to zoom in and just make sure that the vertical axis, the y-axis, is centered along that character. Now this character is pretty easy because he has a very nice edge loop that goes along his center, and just as long as that is lined up with the y-axis, we should be good. Now on the other axis, looking down the x-axis in the side view, again you pretty much want him centered so I have his leg kind of centered along the y-axis as well. Now it's not that important to have this perfect on the front/back axis, or looking at it from the side view, but it does help. Now when we get geometry, it may have been modeled or something like that so we want to make sure that we get rid of all history in the model, so I'm going to select all of the objects in the scene, and then just go modify, freeze transformations, and that basically zeroes everything out. If we take a look at one of the models here and, say, do a move tool, you can see that also the pivots are centered. So if not, you may want to do a modify, center pivot. Now this particular character comes in a number of different pieces, so if we go into the outliner, you can see that I've already grouped the geometry. Now this is under a group called geometry. And then each one of these objects is part of that geometry. Now this scene also has some lights in it, and again, those are grouped. And this will just help me to view the scene as I rig and work with the character. Now, once we have this, we should start setting up layers. Now for this particular scene, we need a layer for the geometry, we need a layer for the skeleton, which deforms the mesh, as well as layers for our controls and other utility nodes. So let's go ahead and go into the outliner, and I'm going to select all of my geometry, and then let's do create layer from selected. And I'm going to double-click on that, and we'll call this layer geometry. Hit save. So now I can template that if I need to, so that way I don't accidentally select it. Now we could do the same for the lights. And I'm just going to create a layer from selected, and we'll double-click on that and we'll just call it, let's call it lights. And I'm going to go ahead and move that down towards the bottom. Now I'm going to go ahead and move that towards the bottom and I will template that so that way I don't accidentally select the lights in the scene. Now in addition to this, we are going to need layers for other parts of the scene, so I'm going to create some empty layers that we will fill up later. So I'm going to create an empty layer here, double-click on it, and we're going to call this one skel. Now this is going to be for the skeleton of the character that deforms the geometry. Create another one, double-click on it, and we will call this one util. Now that's for utility nodes or nodes that are not actual controls, but secondary nodes that help to make the rig work. And then finally, another layer, and this will be for controls, so C-T-R-L-S. So say these are the actual controls that we will use to animate the character. Now once you have all of this in place, you should be ready to start rigging the character and drawing the skeleton.

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