Add transcription for: week01 06 intial joint placement and naming pt3.wav

transcriptions/week01 06 intial joint placement and naming pt3_transcription.json

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+  "text": " Next step that I would do is I would start naming everything because we don't want to have joints that are not properly named. And also once we start connecting things it will make it a lot easier if we actually know what these joints are or what they belong to. And also when we are mirroring the joints then it will also help that as well. So let's start naming those and we can talk a little bit about naming convention. The naming convention is also something that's quite important, especially controls should always be named because that's the thing that animators are going to interact with. So all the controls should have proper names and they should all be kind of called something consistent or it should be all named in kind of the same way. And ideally joins should also be named. Ideally everything should really be named. group, every joint, every control, every, you know, I can, should have a proper name. You shouldn't just, you know, leave the default names that Maya creates, especially if you want to select certain things with mail or, you know, write scripts or whatnot, then kind of naming is really, really important. So in terms of naming convention, I have my own naming convention that kind of picked up from Framestore, I guess, when I was working there, and I really like it, and I kind of extended in upon it over time. So I can share that with you guys and if you want you can obviously follow that along. You know use the same naming convention. There are good reasons why I'm using that naming convention not another because it proved you know to be working really well. So I recommend if you you know you want you can follow the same. If not you can also use your own but let's get started here with naming those things. So I first start with the side of the belongs, so either R underscore or L underscore for left side or M underscore for middle. And so just one letter and then an underscore. So that's kind of my prefix, my side prefix. And then I say what it is. So for example, here in this case it's the arm. And so in the middle is kind of always the name that I want to give that. And also kind of like the part of the belongs. So here for joins I always say it's arm root and another underscore, so that's my name part of the name and then I give it on suffix which is the three letters abbreviation of what it actually is. If it's a join, it's JNT, if it's a control, it's CTL, if it's a group, it's you know, GRP and so on and so forth. You also saw me already doing that with the display layer here, L, Y, R and so on and so forth. Okay. So the good thing is that this name is quite short. You know, it's not very hard to read. You know, you can easily see what it is, and it's also kind of unique. So let's keep on going here with these other names. So I'll call this rarm, mid, jnt, and rarm, and jnt. And this is kind of the same naming convention that I use all over the place. So for the leg, we can already kind of, you know, we also have three joints, so we can kind of give it the same names. So this is the right side. So our underscore, this is the leg and the root, and then we'll give it J and T. And then this is our leg, mid J and T, and our leg and J and T. Okay, then with that, then for things that only have two joints. For example, earlier on we created the neck. There I would just give it root and end. The first one is always root. Sorry, that's M for middle. M, neck, root, J and T. And then we have an end joint for the neck as well. M, neck, end, J and T. For the jaw, we have three joints again. for the lag in arms, m, j, root, j, and t, mid, m, j, mid, j, and t, m, j, and j, and t. And for the head, we kind of have two joints here, a root and an end, and then the i joints, m had root jnt, this is the end m had n jnt, and then this is the left i, so we can call this li. Technically it would also be root, but since we only have one joint here, let's just call it, actually you know what, let's call it root 2. Keep it consistent, r i root JNT. Okay, so with those named and foot here. So that would be right side, so R underscore and then it would be foot, start, or foot root. JNT, then we have our foot mid, R foot mid, JNT, R foot, all this is the heel, so let's do the other one here first, tip, or end joint, so R foot end, JNT. So you already can kind of see the pattern here, always if it's three joints, root mid tip, so root mid-end, it's two joints, root and end. And here we have a fourth joint, so this is kind of a special joint, so this is my heel joint, so I'll just call this foot heel. Heel, chain T. And then for fingers we have actually four joints. So what I do with four joints, again, first one is root, the last one is end, and this one would be mid, and then this one I call tip, because it's kind of like the tip section of the finger, right? So for four joints, whenever I have four joints anywhere in a hierarchy, I call this R. And here for this, this is kind of like the index fingers I would just call it that index root JNT, R index mid JNT, R index tip JNT and R index end JNT. Now I could call this, you know, index finger or something like that, but I don't even think that the finger part is important here in this joint naming. And you know, if we don't use finger, then we can actually keep this nice and short and it's easy to read because we really have one index only. So this would be the middle finger. So let's call this our middle, middle root. I try to keep these names as short as possible also considering that, you know, once animators or loading it into there or referencing it in, then add it will be a namespace added in front so it will already get longer anyway and I don't want any meters having to kind of like you know or us even having to go super wide with this outline or just to be able to read the full name. So this would be a mid as a mid tip and an end. So we can just use copy paste here you know that's what I did I just copied the first name and I just paste it on here and it just changed kind of the part that it belongs to. So this would be end. And what you can also see is... So okay, so this is already the middle joins. That's one thing that I wanted to mention just now. I'll probably come back to me. Let's keep on going here. those joints. That's ring, root, J&T, copy, paste, this part, copy, paste. Oh yeah, now remember. So you want to make sure that your names are unique. You don't want to have twice the same name, for example. So when it's in a hierarchy or in different hierarchies, you can actually have two times the same name for one object, but I wouldn't recommend it because now if you're trying to select a join by name via Melscripting or if you're using this box here select by name which you might have used before and now I try to go in and I try to select R ring, root, J and T. It will actually select all four of them because Maya doesn't know which one you meant so make sure that all your names whatever you give is always a unique name that you only give You know, you never give the same name to two objects, even if they're in different hierarchies. Then Maya is getting confused. So here we want to have root, mid, tip, and... Okay, so I have those named and then the pinky here. So let's name those our pinky root joint. And then we can copy that again, paste it onto the other joints here and I just change that back part. So that would be mid, root mid tip and tip and... Okay, and thumb, R thumb, root, JNT. Okay, then changing that root to mid. Tip. And okay, we've forgotten something. There's one more that isn't named yet. Let's collapse all these guys. You can see what we're missing. Okay, we've pretty much named everything except for the spine. So now the spine is special because we have kind of five joints in here. So I told you before that when I have two joints, I use root and end. When I have three joints, I use root, mid, end. And when I have four joints, I use root, mid, tip, end. When I have more than four joints, like for example in the case of the spine, five joints, we could probably also come up with clever naming convention, how we named that, or named that fifth joint a special way. But here in the middle, I just named these joints by number. So the first one would be spine. We can still use root if we wanted to. And then the last one is going to be m spine, m spine, end joint. And then these we kind of keep the numbers. So we call this m spine 2, jnt, m spine 3, jnt, and m spine 4, jnt. this being the first one, and then 2, 3, 4, and then this kind of the fifth one, the last one, the end joint. And by naming everything just like that, if we go in and kind of expand everything, probably I've seen it before, if you shift on the plus, then you can kind of expand everything in the hierarchy. I'm sure you're aware of that. If we have everything expanded now, what I can now do with this naming convention is I can very, very quickly, for example, select all my root joint by just going in here and using select by name and I can use wildcards, so star root star underscore jnt and this will for example select me all my root joint or I can very quickly select all my end joint kind of the same way star end star underscore jnt this will give me now all my end joints and all my end joints here everywhere are going to be selected okay and so on and so forth or you could very quickly select only the end joints on the right side for example or only the ones in the middle. So m underscore star and star underscore j and t. This will select now only the end joint in the middle but not on the right side anymore and so on and so forth. So it is very very powerful to quickly select based on name if we have it consistent like this. Okay, and not only for selecting here by name, but also for later on when we're going to use a melt scripting, for example, for selecting all the joints that we wanna skin our geometry to, then it will also be really helpful having a naming convention that's kind of consistent and makes sense and it's not too long, kind of the names are not getting too long here. So again, if you have your own naming convention that you wanna stick to, that's fine. then if we're using some L scripting we might have to, or you guys might have to change some of the things that we do in our L script, but if you wanna follow along this naming convention and try it out, I can recommend it. I've been using it for quite a long time and I'm pretty happy with it. That's what we did on Despero for naming our stuff and Framesor and also now at MPC, And the naming convention over there is actually quite similar to this one too. Okay, so now we've named all the joints. We can collapse everything again with shift minus and then everything is collapsed and nice and tidy. So if we just open this without shift and we can see just that one expansion happening, not everything being expanded. So now we've named all these things. We could probably go ahead and kind of mirror everything over already, like all the joints and everything with using the skeleton mirror joint. I want to talk about a few other things. First of all, the naming here for the middle part, I haven't mentioned it before, but this is kind of what's called CamelCase. You might have heard of it before, but it basically means, for those of you who don't know what it is, it basically means that you are starting with a lowercase letter here in the name, and then every new word becomes a new, or every new word starts with a capital letter. So because if we are creating a new object here, actually two and we say this is some text that's hard to read. So this is kind of like harder to read. Okay, if everything is lowercase letters then if we do something like this is a text, that's a bit easier to read. Okay, so you can kind of see the difference here. It just makes it a little bit easier for the brain to kind of like process and read than if everything was small or you know, it would mix it in kind of like a different case. And so that's why camel case is usually a good way to go. That's what it's called, camel case, if you start every new word with a capital letter. You could probably always use underscores, but what I like about this naming convention also is that we always only have two underscores, no matter what. We always have a prefix and an underscore, then we have the name describing what the object really is, which body part it belongs to or what not. And then with camel case, and we have another underscore and then just the suffix, like kind of three letters here, and we kind of do that everywhere. Therefore these uber groups, I kind of don't give it a prefix. I could probably also call this m underscore rig group, m underscore hair group, you know, because it's neither right nor left. If I open the hair, then we can kind of see I already did that here with the hair and the curves here. Kind of did it with the curves here too. Here I kind of didn't really follow that convention too strictly. So here I actually have underscores in here too. And if we make it just with two underscores, again, it will become a little bit easier for scripting things up because then we can kind of always rely on the first part of, if we tokenize the name here by, if we separate it by these underscores, then we can always say the first part is always going to be the side, always going to be tell us what side it is on. And the second part is always going to be the name. And the third part is always going to be the, what it is, if it's a group, if it's a joint, if it's a GU or whatever, or a curve. With, you know, if you mix it, if you have multiple underscores, so sometimes you have two, sometimes you have three. For example, like in this case, it's getting a little bit harder. You can still make it work. So especially I'm kind of thinking ahead, you know, if you're writing melt scripts now or Python scripts or whatever, and you're making it based on name, you can still kind of make it work because even if you separate by underscores to name, you can still say, okay, the first one is always decide. And then you can always say, not the third one is what it is, but the last one is what it is. So no matter how many things you have, whether you have three or whether you have two, the last one is always kind of going to be describing what exactly it is. And here, this is actually not a locator. These kind of are the same. But there was another reason why I choose that here for the eyelash curves. OK, but here for now, we will try to stick with just having two underscores, one after the prefix and one before the suffix. And then we might use it later on when we're actually doing some scripting. Might become in handy. Maybe we will not see any cases of that in this class, but we'll see. So now we've named everything. So that was the first thing about naming that I wanted to mention here before we merge stuff over. The second part that I wanted to mention is orientations, okay, joint orientations. So by default, because we've created our joints in kind of, you know, straight straight lines here, looking from, not from the side, but looking from the front. Because we created the joints for the arm from the top, if you remember, they're going to be in a 100% straight line because it drew them on the bottom plane, right, because we drew them from the top. So they're going to be in one straight line and the spine joints are going to be in one straight line because we drew them from the side view, if you remember. And the leg joints, same thing, we drew them from the side and the foot we drew them from the side. So therefore all of those joints are going to be in one perfectly straight line here looking from the front, same thing for the spine and same thing for the foot. Okay, and let's delete this too. And so this is important, having a straight lines here. It is, I would call it important, but it definitely makes your rigging work a lot easier. And but the other thing is, these rotation axes are working properly by default. So we can rotate the joint around itself, because we haven't moved any in-between joints here around, like we did, for example, for the finger, where it doesn't really work. So we have to kind of fix that first. But I also wanted to mention something that perhaps not super, super important, but something that I like to think about when I'm rigging too. And that is what the orientation axis actually is here. What does rotation forward mean for example? I'll show you what I mean by that. Let's actually take a look here and see if we can tag that spine and bend it forward.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " Next step that I would do is I would start naming everything because we don't want to have joints that are not properly named. And also once we start connecting things it will make it a lot easier if we actually know what these joints are or what they belong to. And also when we are mirroring the joints then it will also help that as well. So let's start naming those and we can talk a little bit about naming convention. The naming convention is also something that's quite important, especially controls should always be named because that's the thing that animators are going to interact with. So all the controls should have proper names and they should all be kind of called something consistent or it should be all named in kind of the same way. And ideally joins should also be named. Ideally everything should really be named. group, every joint, every control, every, you know, I can, should have a proper name. You shouldn't just, you know, leave the default names that Maya creates, especially if you want to select certain things with mail or, you know, write scripts or whatnot, then kind of naming is really, really important. So in terms of naming convention, I have my own naming convention that kind of picked up from Framestore, I guess, when I was working there, and I really like it, and I kind of extended in upon it over time. So I can share that with you guys and if you want you can obviously follow that along. You know use the same naming convention. There are good reasons why I'm using that naming convention not another because it proved you know to be working really well. So I recommend if you you know you want you can follow the same. If not you can also use your own but let's get started here with naming those things. So I first start with the side of the belongs, so either R underscore or L underscore for left side or M underscore for middle. And so just one letter and then an underscore. So that's kind of my prefix, my side prefix. And then I say what it is. So for example, here in this case it's the arm. And so in the middle is kind of always the name that I want to give that. And also kind of like the part of the belongs. So here for joins I always say it's arm root and another underscore, so that's my name part of the name and then I give it on suffix which is the three letters abbreviation of what it actually is. If it's a join, it's JNT, if it's a control, it's CTL, if it's a group, it's you know, GRP and so on and so forth. You also saw me already doing that with the display layer here, L, Y, R and so on and so forth. Okay. So the good thing is that this name is quite short. You know, it's not very hard to read. You know, you can easily see what it is, and it's also kind of unique. So let's keep on going here with these other names. So I'll call this rarm, mid, jnt, and rarm, and jnt. And this is kind of the same naming convention that I use all over the place. So for the leg, we can already kind of, you know, we also have three joints, so we can kind of give it the same names. So this is the right side. So our underscore, this is the leg and the root, and then we'll give it J and T. And then this is our leg, mid J and T, and our leg and J and T. Okay, then with that, then for things that only have two joints. For example, earlier on we created the neck. There I would just give it root and end. The first one is always root. Sorry, that's M for middle. M, neck, root, J and T. And then we have an end joint for the neck as well. M, neck, end, J and T. For the jaw, we have three joints again. for the lag in arms, m, j, root, j, and t, mid, m, j, mid, j, and t, m, j, and j, and t. And for the head, we kind of have two joints here, a root and an end, and then the i joints, m had root jnt, this is the end m had n jnt, and then this is the left i, so we can call this li. Technically it would also be root, but since we only have one joint here, let's just call it, actually you know what, let's call it root 2. Keep it consistent, r i root JNT. Okay, so with those named and foot here. So that would be right side, so R underscore and then it would be foot, start, or foot root. JNT, then we have our foot mid, R foot mid, JNT, R foot, all this is the heel, so let's do the other one here first, tip, or end joint, so R foot end, JNT. So you already can kind of see the pattern here, always if it's three joints, root mid tip, so root mid-end, it's two joints, root and end. And here we have a fourth joint, so this is kind of a special joint, so this is my heel joint, so I'll just call this foot heel. Heel, chain T. And then for fingers we have actually four joints. So what I do with four joints, again, first one is root, the last one is end, and this one would be mid, and then this one I call tip, because it's kind of like the tip section of the finger, right? So for four joints, whenever I have four joints anywhere in a hierarchy, I call this R. And here for this, this is kind of like the index fingers I would just call it that index root JNT, R index mid JNT, R index tip JNT and R index end JNT. Now I could call this, you know, index finger or something like that, but I don't even think that the finger part is important here in this joint naming. And you know, if we don't use finger, then we can actually keep this nice and short and it's easy to read because we really have one index only. So this would be the middle finger. So let's call this our middle, middle root. I try to keep these names as short as possible also considering that, you know, once animators or loading it into there or referencing it in, then add it will be a namespace added in front so it will already get longer anyway and I don't want any meters having to kind of like you know or us even having to go super wide with this outline or just to be able to read the full name. So this would be a mid as a mid tip and an end. So we can just use copy paste here you know that's what I did I just copied the first name and I just paste it on here and it just changed kind of the part that it belongs to. So this would be end. And what you can also see is... So okay, so this is already the middle joins. That's one thing that I wanted to mention just now. I'll probably come back to me. Let's keep on going here. those joints. That's ring, root, J&T, copy, paste, this part, copy, paste. Oh yeah, now remember. So you want to make sure that your names are unique. You don't want to have twice the same name, for example. So when it's in a hierarchy or in different hierarchies, you can actually have two times the same name for one object, but I wouldn't recommend it because now if you're trying to select a join by name via Melscripting or if you're using this box here select by name which you might have used before and now I try to go in and I try to select R ring, root, J and T. It will actually select all four of them because Maya doesn't know which one you meant so make sure that all your names whatever you give is always a unique name that you only give You know, you never give the same name to two objects, even if they're in different hierarchies. Then Maya is getting confused. So here we want to have root, mid, tip, and... Okay, so I have those named and then the pinky here. So let's name those our pinky root joint. And then we can copy that again, paste it onto the other joints here and I just change that back part. So that would be mid, root mid tip and tip and... Okay, and thumb, R thumb, root, JNT. Okay, then changing that root to mid. Tip. And okay, we've forgotten something. There's one more that isn't named yet. Let's collapse all these guys. You can see what we're missing. Okay, we've pretty much named everything except for the spine. So now the spine is special because we have kind of five joints in here. So I told you before that when I have two joints, I use root and end. When I have three joints, I use root, mid, end. And when I have four joints, I use root, mid, tip, end. When I have more than four joints, like for example in the case of the spine, five joints, we could probably also come up with clever naming convention, how we named that, or named that fifth joint a special way. But here in the middle, I just named these joints by number. So the first one would be spine. We can still use root if we wanted to. And then the last one is going to be m spine, m spine, end joint. And then these we kind of keep the numbers. So we call this m spine 2, jnt, m spine 3, jnt, and m spine 4, jnt. this being the first one, and then 2, 3, 4, and then this kind of the fifth one, the last one, the end joint. And by naming everything just like that, if we go in and kind of expand everything, probably I've seen it before, if you shift on the plus, then you can kind of expand everything in the hierarchy. I'm sure you're aware of that. If we have everything expanded now, what I can now do with this naming convention is I can very, very quickly, for example, select all my root joint by just going in here and using select by name and I can use wildcards, so star root star underscore jnt and this will for example select me all my root joint or I can very quickly select all my end joint kind of the same way star end star underscore jnt this will give me now all my end joints and all my end joints here everywhere are going to be selected okay and so on and so forth or you could very quickly select only the end joints on the right side for example or only the ones in the middle. So m underscore star and star underscore j and t. This will select now only the end joint in the middle but not on the right side anymore and so on and so forth. So it is very very powerful to quickly select based on name if we have it consistent like this. Okay, and not only for selecting here by name, but also for later on when we're going to use a melt scripting, for example, for selecting all the joints that we wanna skin our geometry to, then it will also be really helpful having a naming convention that's kind of consistent and makes sense and it's not too long, kind of the names are not getting too long here. So again, if you have your own naming convention that you wanna stick to, that's fine. then if we're using some L scripting we might have to, or you guys might have to change some of the things that we do in our L script, but if you wanna follow along this naming convention and try it out, I can recommend it. I've been using it for quite a long time and I'm pretty happy with it. That's what we did on Despero for naming our stuff and Framesor and also now at MPC, And the naming convention over there is actually quite similar to this one too. Okay, so now we've named all the joints. We can collapse everything again with shift minus and then everything is collapsed and nice and tidy. So if we just open this without shift and we can see just that one expansion happening, not everything being expanded. So now we've named all these things. We could probably go ahead and kind of mirror everything over already, like all the joints and everything with using the skeleton mirror joint. I want to talk about a few other things. First of all, the naming here for the middle part, I haven't mentioned it before, but this is kind of what's called CamelCase. You might have heard of it before, but it basically means, for those of you who don't know what it is, it basically means that you are starting with a lowercase letter here in the name, and then every new word becomes a new, or every new word starts with a capital letter. So because if we are creating a new object here, actually two and we say this is some text that's hard to read. So this is kind of like harder to read. Okay, if everything is lowercase letters then if we do something like this is a text, that's a bit easier to read. Okay, so you can kind of see the difference here. It just makes it a little bit easier for the brain to kind of like process and read than if everything was small or you know, it would mix it in kind of like a different case. And so that's why camel case is usually a good way to go. That's what it's called, camel case, if you start every new word with a capital letter. You could probably always use underscores, but what I like about this naming convention also is that we always only have two underscores, no matter what. We always have a prefix and an underscore, then we have the name describing what the object really is, which body part it belongs to or what not. And then with camel case, and we have another underscore and then just the suffix, like kind of three letters here, and we kind of do that everywhere. Therefore these uber groups, I kind of don't give it a prefix. I could probably also call this m underscore rig group, m underscore hair group, you know, because it's neither right nor left. If I open the hair, then we can kind of see I already did that here with the hair and the curves here. Kind of did it with the curves here too. Here I kind of didn't really follow that convention too strictly. So here I actually have underscores in here too. And if we make it just with two underscores, again, it will become a little bit easier for scripting things up because then we can kind of always rely on the first part of, if we tokenize the name here by, if we separate it by these underscores, then we can always say the first part is always going to be the side, always going to be tell us what side it is on. And the second part is always going to be the name. And the third part is always going to be the, what it is, if it's a group, if it's a joint, if it's a GU or whatever, or a curve. With, you know, if you mix it, if you have multiple underscores, so sometimes you have two, sometimes you have three. For example, like in this case, it's getting a little bit harder. You can still make it work. So especially I'm kind of thinking ahead, you know, if you're writing melt scripts now or Python scripts or whatever, and you're making it based on name, you can still kind of make it work because even if you separate by underscores to name, you can still say, okay, the first one is always decide. And then you can always say, not the third one is what it is, but the last one is what it is. So no matter how many things you have, whether you have three or whether you have two, the last one is always kind of going to be describing what exactly it is. And here, this is actually not a locator. These kind of are the same. But there was another reason why I choose that here for the eyelash curves. OK, but here for now, we will try to stick with just having two underscores, one after the prefix and one before the suffix. And then we might use it later on when we're actually doing some scripting. Might become in handy. Maybe we will not see any cases of that in this class, but we'll see. So now we've named everything. So that was the first thing about naming that I wanted to mention here before we merge stuff over. The second part that I wanted to mention is orientations, okay, joint orientations. So by default, because we've created our joints in kind of, you know, straight straight lines here, looking from, not from the side, but looking from the front. Because we created the joints for the arm from the top, if you remember, they're going to be in a 100% straight line because it drew them on the bottom plane, right, because we drew them from the top. So they're going to be in one straight line and the spine joints are going to be in one straight line because we drew them from the side view, if you remember. And the leg joints, same thing, we drew them from the side and the foot we drew them from the side. So therefore all of those joints are going to be in one perfectly straight line here looking from the front, same thing for the spine and same thing for the foot. Okay, and let's delete this too. And so this is important, having a straight lines here. It is, I would call it important, but it definitely makes your rigging work a lot easier. And but the other thing is, these rotation axes are working properly by default. So we can rotate the joint around itself, because we haven't moved any in-between joints here around, like we did, for example, for the finger, where it doesn't really work. So we have to kind of fix that first. But I also wanted to mention something that perhaps not super, super important, but something that I like to think about when I'm rigging too. And that is what the orientation axis actually is here. What does rotation forward mean for example? I'll show you what I mean by that. Let's actually take a look here and see if we can tag that spine and bend it forward."
+    }
+  ]
+}