Add transcription for: frames_zips/CGCircuit_RiggingCartoonRealistic_DownloadPirate.com.part5_week08 02 neck setup_frames.zip

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+  "text": " There are a few things that we haven't looked at yet here in this rig. We talked about a spine, we talked about arms and legs, skinning and so on and so forth. But one thing that we haven't done yet is the neck. So if we translate this, nothing really happens. Also here in this example I haven't really added a neck control here either. So let's look at that next and then also I want to look at how we can replace some of these controls for other control shapes. So let's first add a neck control here for our neck root joint and I'll probably be looking at the low res or my mid res mesh here, my cage that I've built because whatever my cage is doing because I'm just using that as a raptor former for the final The final GU will kind of do the same thing here. One thing that I should mention though is if you have smooth preview on which I often time see people having on, it will get pretty slow. Okay, so if I'm trying to move my arm, it's very, very chuggy, very, very slow. So what I usually do is I don't turn smooth preview on, I just leave it at one, which will make it reasonably fast, even though you're using a wrapped former here, or at least here with this topology or resolution. And then I found that it's faster, it's even faster if you subdivide it, if you smooth it directly here, mesh smooth. This although you have more resolution now will still be faster, a little bit anyways, than if you turn smooth preview on. Okay, even with the lower res and setting it to 3, this makes everything very, very slow. I believe that Maya has worked on this in Maya 2016, I think this should be a lot faster also if you're using viewport 2.0 and I think they have the new open sub-div in there now which I think should be a little bit faster but still I found a smooth preview to be very very slow at least in previous Maya versions and here in this Maya version 2015 that I'm using here it still seems to be slow so I typically don't use the smooth preview. The other thing that I should mention here at least for this character is there's something that I forgot to mentioned earlier and probably those of you who are using this character will face the same issue where sometimes the shading here can be a little bit off. You might have noticed that already and I think I mentioned it in one of the discussions earlier that the reason why it does this happening here at least on this character and I apologize that I forgot to do that in the model is because the normals are locked. I'm not trying to present you why that this is happening, but sometimes it does happen. If we turn on the normals, polygons and vertex normals, here we go. If they are yellow, that means that the normals are locked. You can see some green lines here, those are unlocked. So we want all of these lines to be green. We now come in here and we go to mesh, or actually it's under normal I think. Unlock normal with the geo selected then everything turns green and now if we come in here we can also see a new node being created here, our poly normal per vertex and if we turn the normal off so we go to display. You don't have to have the normal turn on to do this to unlock the normal, I just want to show it so if we turn the normal back off and now we rotate this forward arm for example then we should see that it's no longer doing that like dark black color here that we saw before because now the normals are moving with it. Again quickly show the difference here again I've done it a couple of times. This was the old one this one was with the locked normals. If I set those to on again, display poorly vertex normals I think there is also a way to make them shorter normal size. Here we go. We'll make them shorter 0.05. You can see that the normals by default on this model here are just facing out in surface direction. But if we are moving this forward and the normals are locked, you can see what's actually going on. You can see that these normals are still facing in the same direction. So they're not aligning themselves with the surface anymore following the drawings. That is because these normals here are locked. And that is the reason why it's looking kind of funky in some of these poses here. Okay, because the normals are not facing out anymore. And because the normals are locked. So coming in here, once more normals unlock, so that they're all green, that may well make sure that when we're deforming our model, here we go. Then the normals are following the surface. So they're always facing in the right direction where we need them to be. And we can turn the normals back off. display, poly, and then vertex normals. The reason why I didn't lock them on purpose, I think it just happens sometimes when you, for example, go between different software. So for example, if you bring this into Cbrush or a Mudbox or something like that, and bring it back into Maya, or export it as an OBJ, import it as an OBJ, I think there are some cases when Maya automatically, or maybe it might not even be Maya, might even be like OBJ or some other format where these normals are then getting locked. There was something that I ran into at work the other day and I just found out about it, so I wanted to let you guys know that this was the case here with this particular model. On your model, if you have your own model, it might not be the case, but it's always good to double check making sure that the normals are unlocked, just displaying the normals, making sure that they're all green. If they're all green, that's perfect, and that means that they're unlocked. And if they are yellow or there are some yellow normals in here, then you want to go to normals and unlock them. So that is one thing that we want to do. And we did it. The other thing is now talking about the, oh, one thing, one more thing that I forgot. You can probably delete that step here. We don't necessarily need that. We can just go and try to delete by type non-deform history because we obviously want to keep our wrap deformer in there. Might not do it, see, takes a while probably to calculate here. Here we go, so now we got rid of it, but we still have denomins unlocked. So now Altru be good and we only have our wrap deformer in here in the tweak node. So now about the neck. Let's add a neck control in here and then talk a little bit about neck rigging or the different options like what we could do potentially. Here I have a very simple neck, I only have one joint. Let's create a new NURBS circle and move it up into place to the first part of the joint here. We can even parent it under if we want to. Let's parent it and then zero everything out. It's going to be in the same space and we can rotate this 90 degrees. You can scale it a little bit bigger. You can freeze it. Freeze everything. Okay, we perhaps also want to do is we perhaps want to take some of these words here. Component mode, take these outer words for example and move them up just so that we can better see it from all sides and then maybe we can take this and this one and scale them in a little bit. I don't know. whatever you feel suitable for, a neck control. Maybe something like that here. Okay, then we can un-parent this. That's silly the history first. Un-parent it. And this will be my neck control. And we can freeze everything. And we can parent this under the neck group. There should be a neck group, I believe we added that. So if we select a joint, we should find our neck group. We can take the neck control, parent under neck group. You can color code that, make it yellow. This is a middle control. OK, something like that. And now when we rotate this, at the moment the joints don't follow. So let's take the root joint here of the neck and parent it under the control. So now when we move to control, we can see we have a control to control the neck. The moment the head does not follow, so what we could simply do is we could take the head group parented under the neck control. So now when we rotate the neck we can see okay now everything follows. We have control over the neck and then we also have control over the different pivot here for the head. I haven't painted any weights yet on this one. Didn't get that far but we can do that later and you guys I think already did but now we have a neck or head control and a separate neck control down here. The other thing that we should also do is on the neck and on the head actually also we should lock and hide some of these attributes. On the neck we probably only want to have rotation x, y and maybe maybe z, x, y, z probably. Maybe twist, I'm not sure about twisting, but maybe let's keep it in. So let's keep all the rotations but we don't need scale, we don't need definitely don't need visibility and also translation we can lock and hide. On the The head is going to be similar, so we can for sure, unless we want to have scaling on the head, which I doubt we want. So let's lock and hide those. We definitely want to have a rotation for the head. We are able to look up and down, left and right, and sideways. Well, what about translation? So at the moment, and when we translate it, we can see it's basically moving it away from the head. If I show the mid-res here, you can see the kind of same thing. So one thing that we could do is we could make it so that when we translate the head around that the neck follows that, that the neck always aims at that. And there are a couple of different ways how we can do it. One simple solution would be just creating an IK in there. If you go to animation, skeleton, IK handle tool, and we draw an IK from here, from the root to the end joint and then we take the IK handle which currently is here outside and we parent it under the head. Okay, so now when we move the head we can see that the IK is following that and basically the neck is always aligning itself. The other thing that we can add here maybe two is we can make it so that the head or the neck joint here is actually stretchy and that we can we We also can add a control to turn the stretch off. So let's work on that. What we probably want to do for that is we probably want to have some sort of measuring tool. Either we can use a curve and measure the length of the curve what we were doing before with the spine, for example, or we can use, if we just have a straight neck, like in this case, we can probably also use a measure tool. So let's add the measure tool in here. Distance. OK. So let's rename those real quick. That will be my neck, stretch, root locator. And the other one will be my end, neck stretch, end locator. And then this will be my M neck stretch distance dimension. And then we want to do it the other way around. It doesn't really matter where they are. Let's call this root and this end. But again, it doesn't really matter as long as we have two in there. So the root, I'm going to snap to the root of the neck down here and I'll parent it to my neck control and then the end joint I'm going to snap to the end of the neck here and I'll parent that under the head control. So now when we move there we can see that we see this updating, right? It's getting longer but the joint itself, this one here in particular, the translation is still the old length so if we reset it, we see the length here now is not the same 9.74, something 9.741, and this joint here, the end joint if we can select it. Probably also don't need to see the IK handle anymore, so let's hide that here and let's call this M-neck IK handle and set the visibility to zero. We notice under the head control if we need to see it later on again. Now if we select this we can see this is 9.741 which is the same as this distance here. And now we can say, OK, well, if this is getting longer, then we want to apply this length here to the translation of this joint, right? Wanted to stretch, stretchy joint. But we probably also want to have an ability to blend it off, but we can first work on a stretch and then we can work on being able to blend it off. So let's take the distance and connect it to the translation here, translate x. We actually don't need to transform, we need the shape here. That's where our distance is going to be on, and we connect it in from distance of the distance dimension shape node node into the translation x of our neck end joint. Translate x. Here we go. Now we can see as we pull this away, we can see that the joint is always stretching. Here we go. Now maybe we want to have an ability to be able to turn off the stretch. So let's work on that. I'll probably add it to the head control here that I can say, hey, do I want the head to stretch or the neck to stretch or not? It could either be in the head control or it could be in the neck control. Because the head will stretch or the neck will stretch when we're moving, translating the head control, probably it's a good idea to be able to say, hey, I don't want a stretch to happen. So let's add that stretch attribute. Let's make it either 0 or 1, and let's make the default maybe on, so that it should stretch by default. And then make it a float. Here we go. I probably forgot to add these underscores that I've added here in other places before. So let's add that now. Add attribute 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And one thing, I'm not sure if I showed you this before, but how we can reorder these attributes, I think I did. So basically, we can just delete the attribute and then do control Z for undoing it. So let's delete the attribute and then control Z, and then we'll add it back to the bottom. And we can lock this one. And now let's connect the stretch in here. So at the moment, it's always stretching. So what we want to do is we want to add a blend in between those We can probably also do it with a multiplier or a condition node or something like that, but I think blend here is the simplest method. So we say, okay, this is the default length, so it's going to be 274. Actually, we can probably get it also from here from the joint. This is the default length. This is what it should be if it's not stretching. So let's copy this into the color r, for example, and into the, or second r, and into the first R, we're going to connect it from whatever this stretch is in here, the distance. Other connected distance into our color 1R and the other one is hard coded to not change. And then we can basically blend. Should it be interactive that it stretches and gets shorter or should it be always the same length here? So we connect our stretch now, stretch attribute into the blender. So I'll bring in my head control, add selected, connect that into the stretch to the blender. And so the default is one. We should see the stretching and we see it. And if we turn this to zero, still stretching. That is because we haven't connected our output yet from the OutColor R into our translation that's still coming from the distance dimension node directly. So let's connect it from the BlendColor node instead, the result, so that was Output R into our Translate X. And now we can see now it's actually not stretching anymore. The neck maintains its length. And if we turn the stretch on, then we can blend that it should stretch, or maybe just stretch 50% or 0% and so on and so forth. Now the problem here is if we're translating this, you can see that the head is still moving, right? The head is still going up there. But when we say, hey, the neck shouldn't stretch, then the head should probably stay attached to where the end of the neck is. So that we can also do quite simply. We can just do a point constraint on the head joint to the end of the neck. So let's select the end of the neck joint and select the head root here and do a point constraint with maintain offset on. And now we can see that the head is staying attached, but the problem is now the jaw is moving. The jaw joins. So we have to see where we parented the jaw at the moment. It's probably under the head control. So reveal, select the jaw. It's under the jaw control. It's under the jaw-oriented group. And the jaw-oriented group is under the head control. So instead, we should probably move that under the head root joint, OK? So that it always stays together with that. And now if we try it, we try to move this. Now we can see now this stays attached. So now it's doing the right thing. We can translate this forward and back our sideways. And the neck is not really getting longer. And then we can turn stretch on. And then we will have the stretchy behavior. Again, here I haven't done any weights painting on this one yet. So if we look at the low res, can probably improve that quite a bit by doing proper weights painting here. Actually we shouldn't even be looking at this one, this is the mid-res. So let's see if we can improve that weighting a little. Now it's spending too much time on it. Okay. So here we have the problem that this should probably all be head. Skin that here, smooth bind, not smooth bind, paint skin weights. paint skin weights and select our head in here head root this paint is all to the head Place. Okay. It is 1-0 as well. Okay, and then those ones down here, that could probably be neck. So let's check our neck. blue joint, parent all those to the neck. And this one here could be 50% between the neck and the head. in the middle. Paint this for 100% to the neck and then 50% back to the head. So I'll replace it with a value of 0.5. Maybe let's show the colors now. Okay. And those ones here should probably be 50%. At the moment I've painted it fully to the neck. But the bottom ones here should probably be 50% between the neck and 50% between the last spine joint or maybe also a little bit to the shoulder. So let's see spine. Let's try to pair them to the last spine joint. Either this one or the one before. We said that we shouldn't really be skinning anything to the end joint, but in this case, I'll paint this 50%. Or it could also be a partial joint. You know, okay, something like that. Here we go. Now we should be able to see that it's working a lot better. Let's close this down, close that. Now if we look at the final result here, this is what we get. Maybe it could be painted a little bit different. too happy with this deformation here, just because it's making such a curvy curvy result here. Perhaps this one could be painted more towards the neck. This one here could also be painted more towards the back, I think, as well. Or neck. This one here maybe 50%. Let's see what we get here. Okay. That could work a little bit better maybe. Let's reset the rotation here. You can probably fine tune that too, but I feel this doesn't look too bad. for, you know, five minutes of work. Okay. So this could be a possible solution for the neck. We have stretching, and then we can say, okay, don't stretch. Then we can translate this wherever we want, but you can see that it will still kind of do the right thing. And then obviously we can rotate that. And then on top of that we also have our neck rotation, where we can rotate our neck in FK as well. Okay, this could be a possible neck rig. Very, very simple, not too complicated to do. There is one downside to that, using the IK handle in there. And that is when we try to twist. It's twisting quite low here in the neck. Actually, this doesn't look too bad. I mean, here you can kind of see it. That we probably want to have more of a distribution in the neck and not start rotating from the root of the neck, which happens when we're doing twisting with the IK handle, which we do at the moment because the IK handle is just parented under that one. So perhaps a better way would be instead of using an IKHandle to do the aiming port here. If we actually did an aim constraint with an up vector, so we can also try that real quick. And this is going to be a life, life demo. So I haven't prepared that. So let's see if it works and forgive me if it doesn't. Let's save this here real quick. So I can go back if the other method fails. Uh, so let's call this week eight and then let's call this one. Let's call this neck rig part one. So instead of, actually, this distance dimension can probably go under the don't move group in the rig. Don't move. It's hidden. And then let's get the icon handle. So the IKHandle was under the head control. I think that's where we put it. And delete the IKHandle. Make sure that you're in the default pose here before we do. Delete the IKHandle if you're even trying the IKHandle first. And then instead now we want to do an aim constraint. So we create a new locator. I'm just thinking maybe we can even use the locator that we already have, because we already have a locator in there. The locator for the end of the stretching. I don't know why it's so small. Here it is. So we already have a locator in there for the stretching part. So we can probably just aim our neck at that locator. All right. The only thing that we do need is we do need an up vector. So let's create a new one, Locator, and snap it to the root of the neck. And I moved it a little bit to the side and parent it under the neck control. So that goes along for the right. So this is going to be our up vector. Let's call this mNecAimUpLocator. Remember that name. So we need to fill it into the aim constraint in a second. And then let's take the neck root. Actually, let's first take the neck stretch end locator that we want to aim towards, then the neck root joint. And then we'll create an aim constraint. And now I want to see again what we have to aim. So make sure that you're in, I think, it is local space here. Or object space. I think object space and local space will both work. No. Make sure I think you have to be in object space for that. So we want to aim. Aim axis is going to be our x here in this case. So 1, 0, 0. That's the aim axis. And then the up axis should be z. So 0 is 0, 1 would be my up vector. And then we want to use object up and we type in here mneckAIM up locator. I think that's what we called it. Let's see if that works. Apply and it created the aim constraint and it didn't rotate or anything. It's still the same. And we have zero rotations and zero offsets, although we didn't use maintain offset on. So that's great. That means we did everything correct. Now let's see if it does the trick here. So now we have that aiming, but if we twist it, it should not twist too much. Okay, so let's see what we get now. Now this is looking better than what we had before. Again, we can probably still fine tune it a little bit with the weighting, but we have the rotation of the head. We have the neck side motion and we have forward-back. And we have the twisting, which now doesn't twist from the root of the neck anymore, but rather has a little bit of a distribution anyways. What we could also do is we could add a partial joint or a twist joint. LEGO is showing before here on the arm. We could do something similar here for the neck as well to get this little bit of a distribution here going down the neck because right now it feels this should maybe rotate a little bit. So if we look at our low res here this one should probably rotate a little bit with it. So let's try adding that. We create a new new joint and parent it under the neck root. Then zero it out, then it's in the same space, And then we can just take the translation here, paste it onto here, zero that out. Now it's in the same space as this child joint. Then we can divide that by two, so or multiply, multiply equals 0.5. Then we'll be exactly in between. Make this a little bit bigger. This is our twist joint. So M, neck, twist, joint. now we can say, OK, well, if this rotates, then we want the neck to also rotate half of that. So connecting the rotate y with a multiply diviner to get half of that into the rotate y of that joint. Before we do that, let's actually skin it first. At the moment it's not part of the skin cluster, so let's take this join, let's take the skin and then go skin add influence. Turning use geometry off, turning weights locking on and a default weight of zero, so we don't destroy any of our existing weighting. And then we can try to skin. Instead of that being on the neck, we can put it onto our twist neck joint. Just going to be careful here and just painting with 50% for now. You can still fine tune that too later on. Now if we rotate this, we should see a little bit of twisting, and now we can connect this. If that rotates, let's say 40 degrees, then our neck should rotate 20 degrees, right? So let's connect those two things together. with a multiply divide node. I think it was rotate y into input y and an output y. I could have used x here too, but since we're using y to y, I might as well use y. And we're dividing that are multiplying with 0.5. Now we get half of this rotation here happening. At the moment, it doesn't look too good, because I think I still have neck influence here, which would be neck. Anything above that point should not be weighted to the neck anymore. It should all be weighted to the twist joint, or between the twist joint and the head joint, if anything. Skin. So you can see we have all that influence from the neck up there. Just trying to replace that with a value of 1. Okay, and prep something like that. a little bit better. Could potentially also do something with this one, that this one should probably twist a little bit more. So then just we wait it to our twist joint. points down here. It's too much. Let's add a value of 0.1 and keep adding. Now we can fine-tune that a little. Perhaps something like that. Let's see what we get. Okay. Maybe not 100% great yet. But again, keeping in mind that we didn't work on this for super long. It's looking pretty decent. Head root. Let's add those back to the head. OK. So now we have our left and right, our twisting, translation, pretty much everything working. We can move to whatever we want because we have our stretch turned to zero and then we can turn our stretch on if we actually want our head to or our neck to be stretchy.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " There are a few things that we haven't looked at yet here in this rig. We talked about a spine, we talked about arms and legs, skinning and so on and so forth. But one thing that we haven't done yet is the neck. So if we translate this, nothing really happens. Also here in this example I haven't really added a neck control here either. So let's look at that next and then also I want to look at how we can replace some of these controls for other control shapes. So let's first add a neck control here for our neck root joint and I'll probably be looking at the low res or my mid res mesh here, my cage that I've built because whatever my cage is doing because I'm just using that as a raptor former for the final The final GU will kind of do the same thing here. One thing that I should mention though is if you have smooth preview on which I often time see people having on, it will get pretty slow. Okay, so if I'm trying to move my arm, it's very, very chuggy, very, very slow. So what I usually do is I don't turn smooth preview on, I just leave it at one, which will make it reasonably fast, even though you're using a wrapped former here, or at least here with this topology or resolution. And then I found that it's faster, it's even faster if you subdivide it, if you smooth it directly here, mesh smooth. This although you have more resolution now will still be faster, a little bit anyways, than if you turn smooth preview on. Okay, even with the lower res and setting it to 3, this makes everything very, very slow. I believe that Maya has worked on this in Maya 2016, I think this should be a lot faster also if you're using viewport 2.0 and I think they have the new open sub-div in there now which I think should be a little bit faster but still I found a smooth preview to be very very slow at least in previous Maya versions and here in this Maya version 2015 that I'm using here it still seems to be slow so I typically don't use the smooth preview. The other thing that I should mention here at least for this character is there's something that I forgot to mentioned earlier and probably those of you who are using this character will face the same issue where sometimes the shading here can be a little bit off. You might have noticed that already and I think I mentioned it in one of the discussions earlier that the reason why it does this happening here at least on this character and I apologize that I forgot to do that in the model is because the normals are locked. I'm not trying to present you why that this is happening, but sometimes it does happen. If we turn on the normals, polygons and vertex normals, here we go. If they are yellow, that means that the normals are locked. You can see some green lines here, those are unlocked. So we want all of these lines to be green. We now come in here and we go to mesh, or actually it's under normal I think. Unlock normal with the geo selected then everything turns green and now if we come in here we can also see a new node being created here, our poly normal per vertex and if we turn the normal off so we go to display. You don't have to have the normal turn on to do this to unlock the normal, I just want to show it so if we turn the normal back off and now we rotate this forward arm for example then we should see that it's no longer doing that like dark black color here that we saw before because now the normals are moving with it. Again quickly show the difference here again I've done it a couple of times. This was the old one this one was with the locked normals. If I set those to on again, display poorly vertex normals I think there is also a way to make them shorter normal size. Here we go. We'll make them shorter 0.05. You can see that the normals by default on this model here are just facing out in surface direction. But if we are moving this forward and the normals are locked, you can see what's actually going on. You can see that these normals are still facing in the same direction. So they're not aligning themselves with the surface anymore following the drawings. That is because these normals here are locked. And that is the reason why it's looking kind of funky in some of these poses here. Okay, because the normals are not facing out anymore. And because the normals are locked. So coming in here, once more normals unlock, so that they're all green, that may well make sure that when we're deforming our model, here we go. Then the normals are following the surface. So they're always facing in the right direction where we need them to be. And we can turn the normals back off. display, poly, and then vertex normals. The reason why I didn't lock them on purpose, I think it just happens sometimes when you, for example, go between different software. So for example, if you bring this into Cbrush or a Mudbox or something like that, and bring it back into Maya, or export it as an OBJ, import it as an OBJ, I think there are some cases when Maya automatically, or maybe it might not even be Maya, might even be like OBJ or some other format where these normals are then getting locked. There was something that I ran into at work the other day and I just found out about it, so I wanted to let you guys know that this was the case here with this particular model. On your model, if you have your own model, it might not be the case, but it's always good to double check making sure that the normals are unlocked, just displaying the normals, making sure that they're all green. If they're all green, that's perfect, and that means that they're unlocked. And if they are yellow or there are some yellow normals in here, then you want to go to normals and unlock them. So that is one thing that we want to do. And we did it. The other thing is now talking about the, oh, one thing, one more thing that I forgot. You can probably delete that step here. We don't necessarily need that. We can just go and try to delete by type non-deform history because we obviously want to keep our wrap deformer in there. Might not do it, see, takes a while probably to calculate here. Here we go, so now we got rid of it, but we still have denomins unlocked. So now Altru be good and we only have our wrap deformer in here in the tweak node. So now about the neck. Let's add a neck control in here and then talk a little bit about neck rigging or the different options like what we could do potentially. Here I have a very simple neck, I only have one joint. Let's create a new NURBS circle and move it up into place to the first part of the joint here. We can even parent it under if we want to. Let's parent it and then zero everything out. It's going to be in the same space and we can rotate this 90 degrees. You can scale it a little bit bigger. You can freeze it. Freeze everything. Okay, we perhaps also want to do is we perhaps want to take some of these words here. Component mode, take these outer words for example and move them up just so that we can better see it from all sides and then maybe we can take this and this one and scale them in a little bit. I don't know. whatever you feel suitable for, a neck control. Maybe something like that here. Okay, then we can un-parent this. That's silly the history first. Un-parent it. And this will be my neck control. And we can freeze everything. And we can parent this under the neck group. There should be a neck group, I believe we added that. So if we select a joint, we should find our neck group. We can take the neck control, parent under neck group. You can color code that, make it yellow. This is a middle control. OK, something like that. And now when we rotate this, at the moment the joints don't follow. So let's take the root joint here of the neck and parent it under the control. So now when we move to control, we can see we have a control to control the neck. The moment the head does not follow, so what we could simply do is we could take the head group parented under the neck control. So now when we rotate the neck we can see okay now everything follows. We have control over the neck and then we also have control over the different pivot here for the head. I haven't painted any weights yet on this one. Didn't get that far but we can do that later and you guys I think already did but now we have a neck or head control and a separate neck control down here. The other thing that we should also do is on the neck and on the head actually also we should lock and hide some of these attributes. On the neck we probably only want to have rotation x, y and maybe maybe z, x, y, z probably. Maybe twist, I'm not sure about twisting, but maybe let's keep it in. So let's keep all the rotations but we don't need scale, we don't need definitely don't need visibility and also translation we can lock and hide. On the The head is going to be similar, so we can for sure, unless we want to have scaling on the head, which I doubt we want. So let's lock and hide those. We definitely want to have a rotation for the head. We are able to look up and down, left and right, and sideways. Well, what about translation? So at the moment, and when we translate it, we can see it's basically moving it away from the head. If I show the mid-res here, you can see the kind of same thing. So one thing that we could do is we could make it so that when we translate the head around that the neck follows that, that the neck always aims at that. And there are a couple of different ways how we can do it. One simple solution would be just creating an IK in there. If you go to animation, skeleton, IK handle tool, and we draw an IK from here, from the root to the end joint and then we take the IK handle which currently is here outside and we parent it under the head. Okay, so now when we move the head we can see that the IK is following that and basically the neck is always aligning itself. The other thing that we can add here maybe two is we can make it so that the head or the neck joint here is actually stretchy and that we can we We also can add a control to turn the stretch off. So let's work on that. What we probably want to do for that is we probably want to have some sort of measuring tool. Either we can use a curve and measure the length of the curve what we were doing before with the spine, for example, or we can use, if we just have a straight neck, like in this case, we can probably also use a measure tool. So let's add the measure tool in here. Distance. OK. So let's rename those real quick. That will be my neck, stretch, root locator. And the other one will be my end, neck stretch, end locator. And then this will be my M neck stretch distance dimension. And then we want to do it the other way around. It doesn't really matter where they are. Let's call this root and this end. But again, it doesn't really matter as long as we have two in there. So the root, I'm going to snap to the root of the neck down here and I'll parent it to my neck control and then the end joint I'm going to snap to the end of the neck here and I'll parent that under the head control. So now when we move there we can see that we see this updating, right? It's getting longer but the joint itself, this one here in particular, the translation is still the old length so if we reset it, we see the length here now is not the same 9.74, something 9.741, and this joint here, the end joint if we can select it. Probably also don't need to see the IK handle anymore, so let's hide that here and let's call this M-neck IK handle and set the visibility to zero. We notice under the head control if we need to see it later on again. Now if we select this we can see this is 9.741 which is the same as this distance here. And now we can say, OK, well, if this is getting longer, then we want to apply this length here to the translation of this joint, right? Wanted to stretch, stretchy joint. But we probably also want to have an ability to blend it off, but we can first work on a stretch and then we can work on being able to blend it off. So let's take the distance and connect it to the translation here, translate x. We actually don't need to transform, we need the shape here. That's where our distance is going to be on, and we connect it in from distance of the distance dimension shape node node into the translation x of our neck end joint. Translate x. Here we go. Now we can see as we pull this away, we can see that the joint is always stretching. Here we go. Now maybe we want to have an ability to be able to turn off the stretch. So let's work on that. I'll probably add it to the head control here that I can say, hey, do I want the head to stretch or the neck to stretch or not? It could either be in the head control or it could be in the neck control. Because the head will stretch or the neck will stretch when we're moving, translating the head control, probably it's a good idea to be able to say, hey, I don't want a stretch to happen. So let's add that stretch attribute. Let's make it either 0 or 1, and let's make the default maybe on, so that it should stretch by default. And then make it a float. Here we go. I probably forgot to add these underscores that I've added here in other places before. So let's add that now. Add attribute 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. And one thing, I'm not sure if I showed you this before, but how we can reorder these attributes, I think I did. So basically, we can just delete the attribute and then do control Z for undoing it. So let's delete the attribute and then control Z, and then we'll add it back to the bottom. And we can lock this one. And now let's connect the stretch in here. So at the moment, it's always stretching. So what we want to do is we want to add a blend in between those We can probably also do it with a multiplier or a condition node or something like that, but I think blend here is the simplest method. So we say, okay, this is the default length, so it's going to be 274. Actually, we can probably get it also from here from the joint. This is the default length. This is what it should be if it's not stretching. So let's copy this into the color r, for example, and into the, or second r, and into the first R, we're going to connect it from whatever this stretch is in here, the distance. Other connected distance into our color 1R and the other one is hard coded to not change. And then we can basically blend. Should it be interactive that it stretches and gets shorter or should it be always the same length here? So we connect our stretch now, stretch attribute into the blender. So I'll bring in my head control, add selected, connect that into the stretch to the blender. And so the default is one. We should see the stretching and we see it. And if we turn this to zero, still stretching. That is because we haven't connected our output yet from the OutColor R into our translation that's still coming from the distance dimension node directly. So let's connect it from the BlendColor node instead, the result, so that was Output R into our Translate X. And now we can see now it's actually not stretching anymore. The neck maintains its length. And if we turn the stretch on, then we can blend that it should stretch, or maybe just stretch 50% or 0% and so on and so forth. Now the problem here is if we're translating this, you can see that the head is still moving, right? The head is still going up there. But when we say, hey, the neck shouldn't stretch, then the head should probably stay attached to where the end of the neck is. So that we can also do quite simply. We can just do a point constraint on the head joint to the end of the neck. So let's select the end of the neck joint and select the head root here and do a point constraint with maintain offset on. And now we can see that the head is staying attached, but the problem is now the jaw is moving. The jaw joins. So we have to see where we parented the jaw at the moment. It's probably under the head control. So reveal, select the jaw. It's under the jaw control. It's under the jaw-oriented group. And the jaw-oriented group is under the head control. So instead, we should probably move that under the head root joint, OK? So that it always stays together with that. And now if we try it, we try to move this. Now we can see now this stays attached. So now it's doing the right thing. We can translate this forward and back our sideways. And the neck is not really getting longer. And then we can turn stretch on. And then we will have the stretchy behavior. Again, here I haven't done any weights painting on this one yet. So if we look at the low res, can probably improve that quite a bit by doing proper weights painting here. Actually we shouldn't even be looking at this one, this is the mid-res. So let's see if we can improve that weighting a little. Now it's spending too much time on it. Okay. So here we have the problem that this should probably all be head. Skin that here, smooth bind, not smooth bind, paint skin weights. paint skin weights and select our head in here head root this paint is all to the head Place. Okay. It is 1-0 as well. Okay, and then those ones down here, that could probably be neck. So let's check our neck. blue joint, parent all those to the neck. And this one here could be 50% between the neck and the head. in the middle. Paint this for 100% to the neck and then 50% back to the head. So I'll replace it with a value of 0.5. Maybe let's show the colors now. Okay. And those ones here should probably be 50%. At the moment I've painted it fully to the neck. But the bottom ones here should probably be 50% between the neck and 50% between the last spine joint or maybe also a little bit to the shoulder. So let's see spine. Let's try to pair them to the last spine joint. Either this one or the one before. We said that we shouldn't really be skinning anything to the end joint, but in this case, I'll paint this 50%. Or it could also be a partial joint. You know, okay, something like that. Here we go. Now we should be able to see that it's working a lot better. Let's close this down, close that. Now if we look at the final result here, this is what we get. Maybe it could be painted a little bit different. too happy with this deformation here, just because it's making such a curvy curvy result here. Perhaps this one could be painted more towards the neck. This one here could also be painted more towards the back, I think, as well. Or neck. This one here maybe 50%. Let's see what we get here. Okay. That could work a little bit better maybe. Let's reset the rotation here. You can probably fine tune that too, but I feel this doesn't look too bad. for, you know, five minutes of work. Okay. So this could be a possible solution for the neck. We have stretching, and then we can say, okay, don't stretch. Then we can translate this wherever we want, but you can see that it will still kind of do the right thing. And then obviously we can rotate that. And then on top of that we also have our neck rotation, where we can rotate our neck in FK as well. Okay, this could be a possible neck rig. Very, very simple, not too complicated to do. There is one downside to that, using the IK handle in there. And that is when we try to twist. It's twisting quite low here in the neck. Actually, this doesn't look too bad. I mean, here you can kind of see it. That we probably want to have more of a distribution in the neck and not start rotating from the root of the neck, which happens when we're doing twisting with the IK handle, which we do at the moment because the IK handle is just parented under that one. So perhaps a better way would be instead of using an IKHandle to do the aiming port here. If we actually did an aim constraint with an up vector, so we can also try that real quick. And this is going to be a life, life demo. So I haven't prepared that. So let's see if it works and forgive me if it doesn't. Let's save this here real quick. So I can go back if the other method fails. Uh, so let's call this week eight and then let's call this one. Let's call this neck rig part one. So instead of, actually, this distance dimension can probably go under the don't move group in the rig. Don't move. It's hidden. And then let's get the icon handle. So the IKHandle was under the head control. I think that's where we put it. And delete the IKHandle. Make sure that you're in the default pose here before we do. Delete the IKHandle if you're even trying the IKHandle first. And then instead now we want to do an aim constraint. So we create a new locator. I'm just thinking maybe we can even use the locator that we already have, because we already have a locator in there. The locator for the end of the stretching. I don't know why it's so small. Here it is. So we already have a locator in there for the stretching part. So we can probably just aim our neck at that locator. All right. The only thing that we do need is we do need an up vector. So let's create a new one, Locator, and snap it to the root of the neck. And I moved it a little bit to the side and parent it under the neck control. So that goes along for the right. So this is going to be our up vector. Let's call this mNecAimUpLocator. Remember that name. So we need to fill it into the aim constraint in a second. And then let's take the neck root. Actually, let's first take the neck stretch end locator that we want to aim towards, then the neck root joint. And then we'll create an aim constraint. And now I want to see again what we have to aim. So make sure that you're in, I think, it is local space here. Or object space. I think object space and local space will both work. No. Make sure I think you have to be in object space for that. So we want to aim. Aim axis is going to be our x here in this case. So 1, 0, 0. That's the aim axis. And then the up axis should be z. So 0 is 0, 1 would be my up vector. And then we want to use object up and we type in here mneckAIM up locator. I think that's what we called it. Let's see if that works. Apply and it created the aim constraint and it didn't rotate or anything. It's still the same. And we have zero rotations and zero offsets, although we didn't use maintain offset on. So that's great. That means we did everything correct. Now let's see if it does the trick here. So now we have that aiming, but if we twist it, it should not twist too much. Okay, so let's see what we get now. Now this is looking better than what we had before. Again, we can probably still fine tune it a little bit with the weighting, but we have the rotation of the head. We have the neck side motion and we have forward-back. And we have the twisting, which now doesn't twist from the root of the neck anymore, but rather has a little bit of a distribution anyways. What we could also do is we could add a partial joint or a twist joint. LEGO is showing before here on the arm. We could do something similar here for the neck as well to get this little bit of a distribution here going down the neck because right now it feels this should maybe rotate a little bit. So if we look at our low res here this one should probably rotate a little bit with it. So let's try adding that. We create a new new joint and parent it under the neck root. Then zero it out, then it's in the same space, And then we can just take the translation here, paste it onto here, zero that out. Now it's in the same space as this child joint. Then we can divide that by two, so or multiply, multiply equals 0.5. Then we'll be exactly in between. Make this a little bit bigger. This is our twist joint. So M, neck, twist, joint. now we can say, OK, well, if this rotates, then we want the neck to also rotate half of that. So connecting the rotate y with a multiply diviner to get half of that into the rotate y of that joint. Before we do that, let's actually skin it first. At the moment it's not part of the skin cluster, so let's take this join, let's take the skin and then go skin add influence. Turning use geometry off, turning weights locking on and a default weight of zero, so we don't destroy any of our existing weighting. And then we can try to skin. Instead of that being on the neck, we can put it onto our twist neck joint. Just going to be careful here and just painting with 50% for now. You can still fine tune that too later on. Now if we rotate this, we should see a little bit of twisting, and now we can connect this. If that rotates, let's say 40 degrees, then our neck should rotate 20 degrees, right? So let's connect those two things together. with a multiply divide node. I think it was rotate y into input y and an output y. I could have used x here too, but since we're using y to y, I might as well use y. And we're dividing that are multiplying with 0.5. Now we get half of this rotation here happening. At the moment, it doesn't look too good, because I think I still have neck influence here, which would be neck. Anything above that point should not be weighted to the neck anymore. It should all be weighted to the twist joint, or between the twist joint and the head joint, if anything. Skin. So you can see we have all that influence from the neck up there. Just trying to replace that with a value of 1. Okay, and prep something like that. a little bit better. Could potentially also do something with this one, that this one should probably twist a little bit more. So then just we wait it to our twist joint. points down here. It's too much. Let's add a value of 0.1 and keep adding. Now we can fine-tune that a little. Perhaps something like that. Let's see what we get. Okay. Maybe not 100% great yet. But again, keeping in mind that we didn't work on this for super long. It's looking pretty decent. Head root. Let's add those back to the head. OK. So now we have our left and right, our twisting, translation, pretty much everything working. We can move to whatever we want because we have our stretch turned to zero and then we can turn our stretch on if we actually want our head to or our neck to be stretchy."
+    }
+  ]
+}