Add transcription for: week04 02 spine even joint distribution.wav

transcriptions/week04 02 spine even joint distribution_transcription.json

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+  "text": " First, I want to show you how we can create a new spine with maybe more joints than what we currently have and also talk about joint placement here with you guys. So let's take the existing spine and rip it out. So what we have to do for that is we have to want to obviously keep all of our other stuff. So I'll take the chest group and just parent it outside, un-parent. And then I should be able to just take the spine group, which now should be separated from everything else. Let's detach the skin here also. Detach skin and hide it. Now if we go to the spine group, there should not be anything in it anymore. Just a spine rake by itself, because we parented the chest outside. Now we can delete the spine group and everything that's underneath there. Delete. And now we don't have a spine anymore. still have the body, but those things are not connected. Now we can create a new spine from scratch. So what I want to look at now is I want to show you guys how we can create a spine with more than just our five joints. And also I want to talk about how we can get them or an idea how we can get them distributed a little bit more evenly without having to rely on manual placement. And the idea would be to use. So first of all, I want to create a spine with nine joints now, before we had, I think, five. And I think I mentioned this also early on. I always would go either for five joints, nine joints, or more than that. But the idea behind it is that you want to have one at the root, one at the end, one in the middle. So that would be three. Three is a good number. Then five is also a good number because you basically just add one at 25%, one at 75%. So then you end up with five joints. If you add four more, again, in all these spaces in between, then you would end up with nine. And then if you add, I think it would be eight more, then you would end up with what? Is that 16 then? Sorry, sorry, 17. I think nine plus eight for the spaces that would be 17 joints. It's probably also a good idea because then you still get always to have one in between two other joints. So if you want to, for example, then create stretching or squash and stretching and things like that, you can just take this and you will always have 1 at 50%, 1 at 25%, 1 at 75% and then in between those bases as well. So you can really get like kind of an even distribution of your stretch or squash or you know scale or other things like that. So I would go for 9 joins. I think anything beyond 9 you know if you have 17 is probably a little bit overkill because you're not gaining a whole lot more from it especially because of the topology here that we have, it's not that dense. So even if there are two joints in here very close to each other, they don't make a difference whether you bent this one or the other one, or not really anyway. So let's go for nine joints, but the same technique that I'm going to show you now for placing those joints evenly, we can also use for any number of joints really. So the idea being that we use a curve to place those joints. So I'll start by creating a curve, CV curve, and I'll go to cubic, and I'll draw my curve that I want to use for my joint placement. Okay, and maybe I'll go, it doesn't really matter how many points you have, let's go with five. And then let's position this a little bit better, kind of like how we want the spine to look like and the curvature and everything. Maybe I should start here, then kind of bend here. And this is also maybe a good topic or a good time to talk about this. Kind of have to think about if you want a more realistic placement or more cartoony placement. A more cartoony placement is you would basically just kind of go into the center of the geometry from the front to the back and place it exactly in the center, so something like that. Perhaps this one may maybe a little bit further back here. Something like that, perhaps. That would be good for that kind of a puppet type of rig. If you wanted it to be more realistic, then you would probably aim for a little bit more bent. Or probably the spine would even go into general a little bit more backwards. And then you would look at reference of a real skeleton where it is placed. but the spine is usually a little bit further in the back. And then it also, we can use pick walking here to step through these points. Here it would kind of really bend or be quite close to the back actually. And that's kind of like how the spine is in a human, more in the back and also more kind of shaped as opposed to more straight, like what the body would perhaps do. I'll try to go for something in between. I definitely wanted to be more cartoony here, So I want it to be more in the center, something like that. Doesn't really matter too much because we can always adjust it later. So now that we have our curve, let's hide everything else, the whole rig here. And I guess we have to parent the chest back into the rig so that that works, that we can hide the whole group here and only be left with our spine curve. We may be called the spine curve, but we don't have to because we are just going to use that for placement. Let's rename it spine placement curve. We'll probably delete it in the end anyway. And then we can create joins, or one join at least, start with that. And now what we want to do is we want to attach that join to the spine. So we can use kerf snapping, holding down C, and see if we can get this up here. So we move it, and we hold down C. Actually, I'm still in point snapping here, so just C. And then we can slide it along that kerf. So that's a good starting point for placing our joints along the spine. But it still doesn't guarantee that, first of all, it's hard to get. But once you have it, and it's sliding along as long as you hold down C. But it might still be a little bit tricky to kind of place them in the right distances from each other, especially if we have nine joints. Still going to be kind of eyeballing. It makes it a little bit easier than just placing them without that curve, but it's still a little bit tricky. But what you can do is you can actually create a motion path. So let's try that. So I'll create my joint here again, and now I will select, I think you select the curve first and then the joint or the object, and then we'll go to animate and we'll go to motion path, attach to motion path, and here it doesn't really matter what you're setting here, we can probably go for, one thing that I forgot, we probably, I wonder if we have to rebuild the curve. We'll see in a second. But let's try time slider here or start and end. It doesn't really matter. Let's go with time slider. So if we're creating a motion path, if you haven't done that before, what it will basically do is it will animate that object along the curve, okay, through the timeline here or through your start and end frame. We are not so keen on that, but what we can do, it also created a motion path node. Okay, so if we go here in the node editor or hyperjade and check that out, what the structure actually looks like. So we will have a spine placement curve. We have our motion path, a couple of other nodes here we don't really care about. And then we have a joint that the motion path is attached to. And actually a couple of other things here too that we also don't really care about. The thing that we do care about is the motion path. Because you can see that it has some animation on it here in terms of u value. It goes from 0 to 1. So the end of the curve here is going to be 1. Let me make this joint a little bit bigger if I can. Set this to 5. So the end of the curve is going to be 1 here, and the beginning of the curve is going to be 0. So we don't really need that animation, so let's get rid of it. So I'll just right click here and say break connections. And now we can really set that value. So we can set it to 1, or we can set it to 0. We can also set it to 0.5. And 0.5 will now be exactly in the middle of that curve at 50%. Or we can set it at 0.2%, or 2.5%, and so on and so forth. So that will make it a lot easier for us to place these joins in an even distribution. So you could always create a lot of joins and a lot of motion paths. And for each new motion path node, you can set a different value or we can just use that one motion path and then kind of duplicating the joined out. So if we start at zero and then we'll duplicate this out and then we'll go back to joint one to our motion path one and going out to the next join, so 0.25. And we'll duplicate it out. And then go to first joined again, motion path, set it to 0.5, and duplicate that joined out. And then we'll go to first joined again. So first joined is always kind of the one that still has the motion path on it. So then we'll go to 0.75, duplicate it, then to first joined, motion path, set it to 1. Okay, so that gives us five joins to begin with. And then we can kind of go back and do the in-betweens here. So then we just have to take between zero and 0.25. So if we wanna have nine joins, then it would be 0.125 here. We'll create duplicate that one out. Then we will, and you can see this is giving you a very even distribution. they're always going to be in the same distance from each other. So let's go continue that. That would be 0.375, I believe. Can always use a calculator if we can figure it out. And then here, the next one would be in between there. So it would be, I think, 0.5 plus 1.25. So that would be 1.625. And then we'll duplicate that one out. And then we come here again. And one last one here in between. That would be kind of 1 minus 0.125. So we can actually do the math in here if we wanted to. I don't know if I showed you that before or not. But if we have 1 here, we can basically or should be able to type in remind us equals 0.125 and that will give us the results so 0.875. Okay so now we have all these joins in here we can now delete the first one or the joint one we don't need that anymore and the motion path and all that stuff here we have our nine joints now oops I forgot to duplicate it out I guess. Now we delete the first joints now we have our nine joints. You can make them a little bit smaller again, maybe two. So now we have them all in an even space from each other. And now what we can do is rename them. So what I'll try to do is... let's see if we can rename them. There are some scripts and I also wrote some scripts over time to rename a whole series but I kind of don't want to use too many scripts here in this class. I want to show you how to do it manually because once you know how to do it manually and you know how to script then you can all the script all that stuff up to make it a lot easier. Let's see if we can, if we have a replace name in here. That's the thing you know I feel like in Maya is kind of okay it's kind of like I I consider Maya being a platform. A lot of the power really comes from the ability to change it or to add new things, to write new scripts and things like that. So therefore, in Maya, the default tools, they're not that great. So for example, there is no way as far as I know anyways to kind of rename a lot of drawings kind of in sequence and things like that. There's like search and replace names and all of that, but prefix, prefix names, but no real good way to rename a series. Perhaps I will show you guys some of the scripts that I'm using later on. I'm not sure yet, but I want to show it to you manually too. Because as a rigger, you shouldn't rely only on scripts. You should be able to do the stuff manually as well. So I'll call this manually now, spine 1, joint, spine 2, oops, 2. Of course it will take longer, spine 3, joint, and spine 4 here. Then we have spine 5. And this one is spine 6, spine 7, spine 8, and spine 9. Okay, then we will parent all these joints together. one comes here, that one comes here, that one comes here, that one there, here, here, here, and here. Okay, now we have our spine hierarchy. And I guess one thing that I forgot here is now we cannot manually place it anymore because I mean we could but I will destroy the evenness. If we wanted to be able to manually still place those joints afterwards, then we would actually have to create all those joints on a motion path and set each individual motion path. Perhaps we can do that in the end here, but we're almost done with this anyway. One thing that we might want to check is we want to probably fix our rotation axis because you can see all those joints have now crazy rotation and translation values. So we want to go in and fix those. I'll select all the joints and go to joint orient tool now. Turn them on and some are facing one way, some are facing the other way anyway, so we'll have to fix those no matter what. What I will do is I will again use the same axis that I mentioned before. So I will make sure that my bending is x and my twisting is y. So a twist would be the primary axis which is facing to the child and then bending I want x to be like x positive and then I select the first joint to the apply. Okay, here we're getting an error message now. It has non-zero rotations. That is because all those joints they have non-zero rotations. So what we'll have to do first is freeze all the rotations. Now we should be able to fix our axis. Come back here. Y is our primary, x to x positive. Hit apply and now we're done. Now we're done. Okay, we've fixed all that. And now we can also see that now we only get one value. That's what's kind of important. We only get one value in Y, which is essentially how far away this joint is from its parent. And we can kind of translate it in that space. Okay, cool. The last joint, if we wanted to orient it the same way as the previous one, then we could come just here in the attribute editor and zero out the joint orient down there, zero, zero, zero. and then it's facing the same way as the previous joint as well. Although again, n joints usually don't matter that much. I don't care about them that much. And we could, by the way, also rename it to n joint now, and jnt and the first one to root if we wanted to. Okay, that's how you can create a spine with even distributed joints.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " First, I want to show you how we can create a new spine with maybe more joints than what we currently have and also talk about joint placement here with you guys. So let's take the existing spine and rip it out. So what we have to do for that is we have to want to obviously keep all of our other stuff. So I'll take the chest group and just parent it outside, un-parent. And then I should be able to just take the spine group, which now should be separated from everything else. Let's detach the skin here also. Detach skin and hide it. Now if we go to the spine group, there should not be anything in it anymore. Just a spine rake by itself, because we parented the chest outside. Now we can delete the spine group and everything that's underneath there. Delete. And now we don't have a spine anymore. still have the body, but those things are not connected. Now we can create a new spine from scratch. So what I want to look at now is I want to show you guys how we can create a spine with more than just our five joints. And also I want to talk about how we can get them or an idea how we can get them distributed a little bit more evenly without having to rely on manual placement. And the idea would be to use. So first of all, I want to create a spine with nine joints now, before we had, I think, five. And I think I mentioned this also early on. I always would go either for five joints, nine joints, or more than that. But the idea behind it is that you want to have one at the root, one at the end, one in the middle. So that would be three. Three is a good number. Then five is also a good number because you basically just add one at 25%, one at 75%. So then you end up with five joints. If you add four more, again, in all these spaces in between, then you would end up with nine. And then if you add, I think it would be eight more, then you would end up with what? Is that 16 then? Sorry, sorry, 17. I think nine plus eight for the spaces that would be 17 joints. It's probably also a good idea because then you still get always to have one in between two other joints. So if you want to, for example, then create stretching or squash and stretching and things like that, you can just take this and you will always have 1 at 50%, 1 at 25%, 1 at 75% and then in between those bases as well. So you can really get like kind of an even distribution of your stretch or squash or you know scale or other things like that. So I would go for 9 joins. I think anything beyond 9 you know if you have 17 is probably a little bit overkill because you're not gaining a whole lot more from it especially because of the topology here that we have, it's not that dense. So even if there are two joints in here very close to each other, they don't make a difference whether you bent this one or the other one, or not really anyway. So let's go for nine joints, but the same technique that I'm going to show you now for placing those joints evenly, we can also use for any number of joints really. So the idea being that we use a curve to place those joints. So I'll start by creating a curve, CV curve, and I'll go to cubic, and I'll draw my curve that I want to use for my joint placement. Okay, and maybe I'll go, it doesn't really matter how many points you have, let's go with five. And then let's position this a little bit better, kind of like how we want the spine to look like and the curvature and everything. Maybe I should start here, then kind of bend here. And this is also maybe a good topic or a good time to talk about this. Kind of have to think about if you want a more realistic placement or more cartoony placement. A more cartoony placement is you would basically just kind of go into the center of the geometry from the front to the back and place it exactly in the center, so something like that. Perhaps this one may maybe a little bit further back here. Something like that, perhaps. That would be good for that kind of a puppet type of rig. If you wanted it to be more realistic, then you would probably aim for a little bit more bent. Or probably the spine would even go into general a little bit more backwards. And then you would look at reference of a real skeleton where it is placed. but the spine is usually a little bit further in the back. And then it also, we can use pick walking here to step through these points. Here it would kind of really bend or be quite close to the back actually. And that's kind of like how the spine is in a human, more in the back and also more kind of shaped as opposed to more straight, like what the body would perhaps do. I'll try to go for something in between. I definitely wanted to be more cartoony here, So I want it to be more in the center, something like that. Doesn't really matter too much because we can always adjust it later. So now that we have our curve, let's hide everything else, the whole rig here. And I guess we have to parent the chest back into the rig so that that works, that we can hide the whole group here and only be left with our spine curve. We may be called the spine curve, but we don't have to because we are just going to use that for placement. Let's rename it spine placement curve. We'll probably delete it in the end anyway. And then we can create joins, or one join at least, start with that. And now what we want to do is we want to attach that join to the spine. So we can use kerf snapping, holding down C, and see if we can get this up here. So we move it, and we hold down C. Actually, I'm still in point snapping here, so just C. And then we can slide it along that kerf. So that's a good starting point for placing our joints along the spine. But it still doesn't guarantee that, first of all, it's hard to get. But once you have it, and it's sliding along as long as you hold down C. But it might still be a little bit tricky to kind of place them in the right distances from each other, especially if we have nine joints. Still going to be kind of eyeballing. It makes it a little bit easier than just placing them without that curve, but it's still a little bit tricky. But what you can do is you can actually create a motion path. So let's try that. So I'll create my joint here again, and now I will select, I think you select the curve first and then the joint or the object, and then we'll go to animate and we'll go to motion path, attach to motion path, and here it doesn't really matter what you're setting here, we can probably go for, one thing that I forgot, we probably, I wonder if we have to rebuild the curve. We'll see in a second. But let's try time slider here or start and end. It doesn't really matter. Let's go with time slider. So if we're creating a motion path, if you haven't done that before, what it will basically do is it will animate that object along the curve, okay, through the timeline here or through your start and end frame. We are not so keen on that, but what we can do, it also created a motion path node. Okay, so if we go here in the node editor or hyperjade and check that out, what the structure actually looks like. So we will have a spine placement curve. We have our motion path, a couple of other nodes here we don't really care about. And then we have a joint that the motion path is attached to. And actually a couple of other things here too that we also don't really care about. The thing that we do care about is the motion path. Because you can see that it has some animation on it here in terms of u value. It goes from 0 to 1. So the end of the curve here is going to be 1. Let me make this joint a little bit bigger if I can. Set this to 5. So the end of the curve is going to be 1 here, and the beginning of the curve is going to be 0. So we don't really need that animation, so let's get rid of it. So I'll just right click here and say break connections. And now we can really set that value. So we can set it to 1, or we can set it to 0. We can also set it to 0.5. And 0.5 will now be exactly in the middle of that curve at 50%. Or we can set it at 0.2%, or 2.5%, and so on and so forth. So that will make it a lot easier for us to place these joins in an even distribution. So you could always create a lot of joins and a lot of motion paths. And for each new motion path node, you can set a different value or we can just use that one motion path and then kind of duplicating the joined out. So if we start at zero and then we'll duplicate this out and then we'll go back to joint one to our motion path one and going out to the next join, so 0.25. And we'll duplicate it out. And then go to first joined again, motion path, set it to 0.5, and duplicate that joined out. And then we'll go to first joined again. So first joined is always kind of the one that still has the motion path on it. So then we'll go to 0.75, duplicate it, then to first joined, motion path, set it to 1. Okay, so that gives us five joins to begin with. And then we can kind of go back and do the in-betweens here. So then we just have to take between zero and 0.25. So if we wanna have nine joins, then it would be 0.125 here. We'll create duplicate that one out. Then we will, and you can see this is giving you a very even distribution. they're always going to be in the same distance from each other. So let's go continue that. That would be 0.375, I believe. Can always use a calculator if we can figure it out. And then here, the next one would be in between there. So it would be, I think, 0.5 plus 1.25. So that would be 1.625. And then we'll duplicate that one out. And then we come here again. And one last one here in between. That would be kind of 1 minus 0.125. So we can actually do the math in here if we wanted to. I don't know if I showed you that before or not. But if we have 1 here, we can basically or should be able to type in remind us equals 0.125 and that will give us the results so 0.875. Okay so now we have all these joins in here we can now delete the first one or the joint one we don't need that anymore and the motion path and all that stuff here we have our nine joints now oops I forgot to duplicate it out I guess. Now we delete the first joints now we have our nine joints. You can make them a little bit smaller again, maybe two. So now we have them all in an even space from each other. And now what we can do is rename them. So what I'll try to do is... let's see if we can rename them. There are some scripts and I also wrote some scripts over time to rename a whole series but I kind of don't want to use too many scripts here in this class. I want to show you how to do it manually because once you know how to do it manually and you know how to script then you can all the script all that stuff up to make it a lot easier. Let's see if we can, if we have a replace name in here. That's the thing you know I feel like in Maya is kind of okay it's kind of like I I consider Maya being a platform. A lot of the power really comes from the ability to change it or to add new things, to write new scripts and things like that. So therefore, in Maya, the default tools, they're not that great. So for example, there is no way as far as I know anyways to kind of rename a lot of drawings kind of in sequence and things like that. There's like search and replace names and all of that, but prefix, prefix names, but no real good way to rename a series. Perhaps I will show you guys some of the scripts that I'm using later on. I'm not sure yet, but I want to show it to you manually too. Because as a rigger, you shouldn't rely only on scripts. You should be able to do the stuff manually as well. So I'll call this manually now, spine 1, joint, spine 2, oops, 2. Of course it will take longer, spine 3, joint, and spine 4 here. Then we have spine 5. And this one is spine 6, spine 7, spine 8, and spine 9. Okay, then we will parent all these joints together. one comes here, that one comes here, that one comes here, that one there, here, here, here, and here. Okay, now we have our spine hierarchy. And I guess one thing that I forgot here is now we cannot manually place it anymore because I mean we could but I will destroy the evenness. If we wanted to be able to manually still place those joints afterwards, then we would actually have to create all those joints on a motion path and set each individual motion path. Perhaps we can do that in the end here, but we're almost done with this anyway. One thing that we might want to check is we want to probably fix our rotation axis because you can see all those joints have now crazy rotation and translation values. So we want to go in and fix those. I'll select all the joints and go to joint orient tool now. Turn them on and some are facing one way, some are facing the other way anyway, so we'll have to fix those no matter what. What I will do is I will again use the same axis that I mentioned before. So I will make sure that my bending is x and my twisting is y. So a twist would be the primary axis which is facing to the child and then bending I want x to be like x positive and then I select the first joint to the apply. Okay, here we're getting an error message now. It has non-zero rotations. That is because all those joints they have non-zero rotations. So what we'll have to do first is freeze all the rotations. Now we should be able to fix our axis. Come back here. Y is our primary, x to x positive. Hit apply and now we're done. Now we're done. Okay, we've fixed all that. And now we can also see that now we only get one value. That's what's kind of important. We only get one value in Y, which is essentially how far away this joint is from its parent. And we can kind of translate it in that space. Okay, cool. The last joint, if we wanted to orient it the same way as the previous one, then we could come just here in the attribute editor and zero out the joint orient down there, zero, zero, zero. and then it's facing the same way as the previous joint as well. Although again, n joints usually don't matter that much. I don't care about them that much. And we could, by the way, also rename it to n joint now, and jnt and the first one to root if we wanted to. Okay, that's how you can create a spine with even distributed joints."
+    }
+  ]
+}