Add transcription for: week02 01 arms and legs ik.wav

transcriptions/week02 01 arms and legs ik_transcription.json

@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+{
+  "text": " Okay, hello everybody and welcome back to week two, just workshop. Today I want to continue where we left off after week one, so we want to continue working on the arms, creating IKF cable and talking about the difference between using blend colors and versus orient constraints, then look at creating some hands and fingers and some macro and some secondary micro controls for the fingers perhaps, and then looking at foot setup with multiple pivot points and using utility and math notes a little bit along the way. So let's get started here and hide my GU again and continue where we left off. So for arms and legs it's usually a good idea to have IK and FK and a blending between the two so that animators can pick depending on what their needs are for that particular shot or moment and they can either animate in IK or in FK. IK is usually good for feet by default and then for arms when the arm or the hand is resting on something like a table and you want to be able to move your upper body without changing the position or orientation of the arm and same thing goes for the foot and the leg and and an FK is very good for you know any type of swinging motion so for example if the arm is kind of just hanging down you're having a walk cycle or something and you want the arm to just swing back and forth then FK is usually a better idea because you're getting this arc for free and the same thing is kind of true for the leg, if the characters for example hanging you know from a tree branch or a pole or something like that and the legs are in the air and you want the character to swing. It's usually better to animate that in forward kinematic, FK and rotation because again you're getting kind of this arc here for free, which is more natural and kind of what your own leg would do in such a case or the arm would kind of swing as opposed to, you know, IK, you would keyframe it in the back and then you would keyframe it in the front and would just linearly interpolate. And then you could perhaps come in and do another keyframe here in the middle, but then still it would kind of go linear from one keyframe to the other keyframe and then to the next keyframe. So you kind of get this angle here. then animators could come in and kind of tweak it, add more keys or tweak it in. The graph editor, the category, and this same roundness feeling, but it will be a lot harder than with FK. With FK, they just have to animate a rotation and they already have their arc. So it's much, much simpler that way. That's kind of the whole reason why it's a good idea to have both ways of animating in your rig and then a blend between the two so that animators can pick which one they want, they want or sometimes it's just a switch, you know, and in companies or later on you could add a script, you know, kind of a button click that switches between the two and also matches like a matching script, which most companies have, so that you can kind of match the IK to the FK and vice versa that they're very close and then you make the switch and then you can just continue animating in the other mode from that point on. So let's start with creating kind of a simple blend and show a couple of things here with that. So what I like to do is, although in Maya there is in the IK handle, when you're creating it there is already built-in an IKFK switch, but I found that it doesn't work too well, especially when you're keyframing and stuff like that. And you know, if you want to go back and forth between the two. So a lot of people that I know, they're using a three hierarchy system, which I want to show you hear, which you probably have, or perhaps have done before yourself, that's what I'm going with. And it's much more robust and controllable, I feel. So it has been around for a long time, but still kind of holding up. So what I'll do is I'll take the root of my hierarchy here, and I will just duplicate it two times. And I'll move it down a little bit each time. And the reason why I'm moving it down is just for visual purposes. Okay, later on we're going to snap them all that they're in the same position again But for now, I'll just move the first one the first to look it down a second down a little bit further And the one that I didn't change that's going to be my IK because the other one the FK one And the blended one those I can later on translate no problem after I've connected everything up But the IK one once the IK is in there and I start moving the route then the IK will kind of stay back and the arm will look tilted down, so it's much harder to move that around. Therefore, I'm not moving the IK and renaming properly or accordingly to that. I'll do the same thing here on the other arm as well, just so that we have it, and we can work on all four sides at the same time, to hit on the leg, move those out a little bit. And always the original one is going to be my IK. So now that we have those duplicated, we can start renaming everything properly. So here on the one that we didn't move, I'll change that to be my IK, or my IK root. And also the children here, my IKmit, my IK and the other two, it's not really important which way you name them. But I'll go with the furthest moved away, I'll use that as my FK. So arm FK and I'll remove the two and arm FK, arm FK end. And then the middle one, the one that's left, that's going to be our blended version. We could probably just leave the name as armroot, but that's kind of what we will be skinning to end the end or what we will use, that arm is blending between IK and FK and that's what we will continue building up upon, either we will skin to or we will create more advanced options here later on. But so for now I'll just call this blend on blend, mid on blend and I'll go through and I'll do the same here on the other ones as well while we're at it. IK, IK, IK. What you could also do, I mean it's not that bad here with the renaming yet, but what you could also look into is kind of doing a search and replace. So for example, if you go to modify search and replace names, you can just replace ARM with ARM FK in this case here, and then you can do the whole hierarchy. Here it's really only three joins and we still have to remove the two from the end, but But it's an alternative of renaming as opposed to clicking on every single one. And then here we would rename arm to arm blend and the whole hierarchy again, only three joins. Okay, and remove the one, making sure that, you know, because whenever there is a one or a two at the end, whenever I see that, it's kind of an indication that this was duplicated and not properly renamed on purpose. Okay, so there should always only be kind of the three letter extension. I know like ones or two, so 58 or whatever in the end, no numbering. Okay, so now we've named that and now we can do the same on the leg. Here, the two legs are kind of, you know, away from each other if we want to move them close so we can just take this group. We can kind of move it. If we get this one line, that's how we move. If we get kind of the box, that's how we parent. Okay. get the line, that's how we move things. So it didn't really change anything in terms of hierarchy. It just kind of changed the layout so that now the two legs are together, the two feet are together and then the body. So let's do the renaming here on this one. So we'll change leg to leg ik, rename it, and then the most outer one is going to be our fk. FK and the middle one is going to be our blend, Lake Blend. And I will remove the one at the end and the two at the end and making sure that everything is named properly now FK root, FK mid, FK end. So that's all good and the blending here, all the worked. And then same thing here on this last leg. So we'll change this to IK, the one that did not move. and then the most auto on the FK, FK, and then this is going to be our blend one. And we can remove the one and the two, and we should be done with it. Okay, and now the next point or next step would be to create our IK arms and legs. legs and the limbs here are very very similar. We can treat them exactly the same way. Then we can just kind of go four times around and do it on all four sides or work on all four at the same time. Two things that I kind of always watch out for and kind of like a sanity check or double check that everything was done correctly so far is making sure that there are no rotations on my IK joint or on any of these joints or any matter. On the the IK root, there should be no rotations, but I expected to have translations in x, y, c, and those translations are basically how much it is moved from the origin. If I were to set those to zero, then it would be end up at the origin, so we have to move it up that much. You know, we have to move it in x minus 14 units and y 129 units up, and then in z backwards minus 1.2 units to kind of end up exactly in that position. So I expect to see values if it's not at the origin here in all three, but on the second drawing I only expect one channel to have translation values, not the other two. And the reason why that should be is that's an indication that the orientation axes are correct, because if we go here and we switch our rotation tool to actually the translation tool, sorry, the translation tool to local, actually to object, to the object itself, then we can see this is kind of the axis that we picked, right? We said that the primary axis should be y here, and that means that it's facing to the child. So the child is actually going to be in that space, in the same space as the parent. So if we moved it along here in white, and we can see we can kind of extend it along the length of the joint. So we just want half of the joint, we can just move it kind of half that distance, and then we'll be in between those two positions here in a way. So that means also that 24.008, that's exactly the distance from this position to that position along this line, along that axis here. So the same thing is kind of true for this one here too. So this joint is moved 20.754 units from this joint along that axis, among the y-axis. That's kind of what we chose for our twisting, right, the primary axis. So no values on rotations on the root and on the mid-joint, and on the mid-joint only one translation value, or one channel having translation values. That's a sanity check, making sure that everything is correct so far. And then when we're creating our iK, I'm going to double check again to make sure that these still remain zero. If they change values, if they get small values or bigger values, that means that something is wrong with the orientation of those joints. And then I will check again a third time, last time after we've created our pole vector to still make sure that those didn't pick up any rotation values. And that kind of makes sure that everything is one plane, everything is set up properly and checking those along the way kind of makes sure that you don't break the whole arm and then later you discover it doesn't really work properly or there's some popping or flipping or whatever going on. This is just a way of setting up as clean as possible. So let's create our IK handles now for our IK arms, IK handle tool. And here we have to pick our rotate plane solver. So if we have reset our settings here, by default it's single chain or SC solver. But since we want to add a pull vector later on, we have to obviously pick our rotation planes over, RP. And now we go in and we create those IK handles. We can do it at the same time here for the other one too. And now if we moved it around, we can see that we can already bend our elbow. But it's also not a good idea to start moving the IK handle around because you will have a hard time getting it back to where it was before. So if you're doing a couple of steps here, we only did one steps so we can use undo but if you're doing a couple of steps and testing and maybe saving opening up your scene you will have a hard time getting this back because you cannot just zero this out you can see that it will end up somewhere else so how do you bring it back to that same position where it was before can eyeball it but now we'll always have kind of rotation values in here right so better would be using undo and not moving that at all then it should still be zero here we have actually some minus zeroes in here but it's okay minus zero or zero is kind of the same thing, as long as it doesn't have any numbers, any values in rotation. So instead of rotating or translating around the IK handle, we should probably create controls and freeze those controls out and then parent that and use the control instead of using the IK handle directly. It's much safer. I'll quickly go in and I'll finish up here by creating the IK handles also for the Lex. And whenever you're getting something like that, that means that the Xerra message means that we picked the wrong joint. We didn't really click on the end joint of the leg. We clicked on probably the start or root joint of the foot because they're so close together here. It's kind of, can happen easily. So there are two ways around that one way would be to kind of go in and for a moment hide the foot group here or the foot hierarchy. And by doing that, then we can, you know, now see where we want to click on and we're not getting or Maya's not getting confused with the foot. The other way would be to just do our IK in the outliner instead. So if we're going back to the last use tool, the IK handle, we can actually do it in here, we can come in here, go into our IK, expand it out, and then we just click on the leg, and then we command, or I think on Windows it's probably control, but here on my Mac it's command, click on the end, and that's also creating our IK handle for us, so you can see you can also do it in the Outliner, not only in the 3D viewport. Then we'll do the same thing for the left leg here as well, expand our IK, click with IK handle being active, click on the root, and then command click on the end, and now we have all four of our IK handles. Then I will start creating some controls for those, and start testing better. I'll clean it up here a little bit by taking these IK handles, and for now just moving them under the rig group, then I can take the whole rig and I can hide it, pressing h and I know I can start creating my control here for the IK arms and legs. So I'll go back to the CV curve tool, make sure that I'm still on linear and I will create a control for it. Just go for a simple cross here. I might take a pass later on at revising all these shapes of the controls but for now I something simple and quick. It doesn't take too long to create. So I'll go with that, show again my rig and position that where it needs to go. So we'll use snapping again, holding down V and snapping it to the end of the arm, rotating it 90 degrees, showing the geometry to see how big we need to scale it up. Perhaps to want to make sure that it is easy selectable and you know we can see it from kind of all over the back front top. Okay that could be good and then we'll duplicate that and using snapping again holding on B oops and translating it over here to the end of this arm. Then we'll duplicate it and make the same for the legs here. Here I will now actually go ahead and I will hide my feet groups for a second just so that I can snap properly to the end of the leg and not get confused that it might snap to somewhere else. So I'll use snapping and snap it to the end of the leg. And I'll snap this over here. here. We have our four controls. Then we can go ahead and we can freeze everything out. Now it is in right position, so we always want to freeze everything. And you can freeze either from, you know, here right clicking, freeze translation, rotation, scale or everything. Or it's kind of the same thing as if you go from here, modify, freeze transformations, and then with the option box, you can also kind of pick what you want to freeze, but if all the freezing everything, translation, rotation and scale, there's also this extra option for joint orient which I usually never use and then some extra options here that I also never change. So MediFault you can just come in here and modify freeze and I will kind of do the same thing as if you right click here and say freeze. And those freeze all will freeze everything or all the channels for translate rotation and scale. Not just what you have selected. Even if I click on visibility it doesn't really matter as long as I freeze all it will freeze everything here, you know, all the translation rotations and scales. So it's not depending on what you've selected. And so now we have to rename those guys, and I will go with a simple name here, write underscore arm ik control. And for the leg, I will change it to be write leg ik control. I want to kind of, you know, make a quick point about that. in Rix, I see that people name that not arm, but hand control. So they call it maybe hand IK, but it's not really for the hand. Yes, if you're translating this, it's moving the hand around, but only because the hand happens to be attached to the arm, right? But really, what you're doing here is you're controlling the arm IK. And the same thing for the leg. This is not really foot IK. It's the leg IK that you're controlling here, and the foot just happens to go along for the right because it is attached to the end of the leg, right? Or will be later on. So make sure that you get that straight. What is leg, what is foot, and what is arm, what is hand? The hand is really only this front part here that has all the fingers, or might have all the finger controls on it. And kind of we can bend the hand up and down and all of that, but translation really happens on the arm in IK. So then this would be the left IK control and left arm IK control. Okay, now we can do our color coding here. I want to be on the shape like we talked about Last week, I want to have this red. I'll pick bright colors for those sides. OK, red. And then blue for that side, also bright color. Here we go. And I know that I'm always on the shape, but because I've done it a lot of times now, but make sure that you're on shape to all the color coding on the shape, not on the transform because we don't want anything that will parent under it later on to inherit that same color. Okay, so done with that. And everything is frozen, everything is correct here on no values on those controls. Now we can start parenting these IK handles under the controls. So we'll set the IK handles, select the control, hit P, parent. Same thing here, parent, this one goes under this control and that I can, it goes under right control parent. Then the next thing, we can parent this to the appropriate groups. So I will take that and I will parent it under all control for sure, but then we can parent it even further. So the left leg IK should go under left leg group, right leg IK should go under right leg group and then we'll have to parent the arms that was under body spine I have to expand the whole spine because we have to get to the chest right chest that's where our arms are so right arm goes in the right arm group left arm goes in the left arm group and now we can already see that you know these groups or these modules packages ricks however you want to call them are filling up so here we have three hierarchies in there and a control so far, but it will come more later on. And having these groups here now kind of allows us to have this whole arm rig kind of separated or contained within each other. We can take this and we can move it around no matter where it is. And no matter how it is oriented, it will kind of always work on its own. Obviously, we want to see it out and have it in the position where we created it. but just kind of making the point about how contained it is. And it's just an arm rig. And later on what we're going to do is we're going to connect these hands to the arms and the arms to the shoulders. So we might change it a little bit up that it's not so self-contained anymore. But for now it is. And that's important because then you can, for example, go in and you can delete, just select the arm group here, delete it. And that gets rid of everything that kind of belongs to the arm. And we can now start creating a new arm or different arm or whatever here, and kind of swap out the different pieces here very easily and kind of work on the rig parts in isolation. Now we wanna create our pole vectors here. So now that we have that control and we can easily kind of go back by searing out that control, we also wanna have a control to kind of, you know, change our elbow orientation or where that elbow is pointing towards. On the IKHandle we have a twist attribute that we could connect to something, you know, but I think it's always a lot better if animators are actually having a control that it can position in space and that the elbow will always point towards it. So typically I don't really use that twist here on the IKHandle. I rather create a pole vector control. So let's do that. Let's go with something simpler. Again, later on I might swap those shapes around. And whenever you rig, you know, when you test, make sure you always set everything back to the way how it was by default before you continue rigging. That will make things a lot easier and, you know, well, much cleaner. So let's take this NURBS circle that I just created here from, create NURBS circle. So even if you go for a circle, that's essentially also nothing else than a CV curve, okay? or a curve, a NURBS curve, so circle. So we'll kind of follow the same rules if I come here and I say show NURBS curves, I can hide all the controls here with one click. And now I'll take this circle and I will move it up to the elbow of my IK. We'll maybe make it a little bit bigger, rotate it 90 degrees, scale it up to five, and I will freeze it in that position. freeze, translate, or actually freeze everything, freeze all, and then I will move it back. And here what you can see is I'm just translating it in Z. When I'm doing that, I can still guarantee that it's looking from the front, it's going to be in the same plane as these joints because we created these joints from the top, so we know that they're all in one plane, one straight line, or plane looking from the front here, and by just translating this back in Z, we can also guarantee that all four points are on the same plane, the root joint, mid joint, the end joint, and that pole vector here, pole vector control. Everything is on the same plane. And that's going to be important so that when we are connecting the pole vector to the IK handle, that it doesn't change the orientation of our joints here. If you create your IK, your pole vector, and it changes the orientation, that's an indication that something is wrong with not everything is in the same plane here. And that's why it's also easier if you start with your character in a T-pose as opposed to having some weird rotation on your elbows in the model already or something, because then it will be really hard figuring out where you have to position this control in order for those rotations not to change. So let's move that back a little bit and just inside and what I found a good distance as a default distance is kind of like one arm length or for the leg one leg length. So if we go from the root to the end, that's kind of the length of the arm and then I'll just apply that inside kind of the same distance. If it's too close, then it tends to flip very easily as soon as you start moving the arm around And if it's too far back, then it kind of loses its connection or visual thing here. Then, you know, animators might forget about it or it's too far away. And they can always move it closer or farther away later on if they have to. But the default I found, it's a good way to have kind of one arm length here. So maybe we'll pick a round value here of minus 40. Seems to be okay. And I'm picking round values so that when I duplicate it and apply it to the other side, I can kind of use the same value here. So you can just apply minus 40 in Z and then I know that they're going to be in exactly the same position here looking from the side. Then I'll freeze those two guys, freeze all because that's going to be our final position for those. Actually, I forgot something. I wanted to change that here up a little bit so I'll go ahead and I'll delete it one more time. And before I duplicate them, I will make them not like the default circle, but I'll take every other CV point here and move those in and create this kind of diamond shape to make them a little bit more unique looking. And then I'll take this duplicated snap it using V key to the elbow here. And then again, I know that I used 40 or minus 40 on that one. So I can just apply my minus 40 again and now freeze it here, freeze translates and freeze translates, making sure that everything is at the default. Here we have one other thing because we created that circle, the first circle from a sphere. We also have some construction history because it was made out of a nerve circle and we froze history so it's creating all these nodes for us. So what I'll also do on these controls is I will go edit delete by type history and that will get rid of these nodes because otherwise Maya always has to evaluate it whenever you start doing anything with this control and these four nodes might not make a big difference but if you have three nodes here and two nodes there and four extra nodes there then it will kind of add up so we want to try to to keep this rig as lean and as mean as possible with no extra baggage so that the performance can be as fast as possible and nothing is there to slow the rig down. It's kind of unnecessary. So let's take this, duplicate it and move it down here to the knee and kind of do the same thing. We'll freeze it in that position at the knee and then we can go from there and kind of just translated forwards just in set making sure that it's still in the same kind of you know plane we don't want to move it to the side or up and down or anything up and down would still be fine because it's still in the same plane too but moving left and right that will kind of deviate from that plane that we have so I really only move it from the knee forwards and then again I kind of see how long the leg is and kind of apply that moving forward so perhaps here 60 could be a good value. Okay, duplicate, snap it to the other knee and also move it forward 60 units. And we can freeze everything here. Freeze, translates. And that one here too, freeze the translates on that as well. So now we froze everything, we deleted the history, should be all nice and clean. Now we can start renaming those controls and then color coding them. Here I will rename this to be something very, very similar or in line with this control. Here we have right arm IK control, because it's controlling the IK of the arm, the right arm. So this one I'll call almost the same right arm IK control. I will call this right arm IK pull control. And we could also potentially call this elbow, but then it's only really the elbow, or it's only going to be the elbow when we're in IK mode, right, it's really only for the IK. So we could call it elbow IK, but then whenever you wanna select it via script or something like that or here with the wildcard, you always kind of have to type elbow and arm IK. While with this, you can actually select all the arm IK controls or all the right arm IK controls, all the ones, you know, or all the IK pull controls, one. So it's very similar or very easy to be consistent to select multiple things at the same time. So I found that to be quite handy. So now I'll change that to be left arm ik poll. And we might change that later on. We can always change these names in the end if we want to, I'd be with them, but now let's go with those names. Right leg IK, pole control, and then left leg IK, pole control. And then the next thing that we want to do is apply our color coding scheme here to the shapes. So that should be red. This should be blue. That should be blue. That should be right again. This is the right side, right? Here we go. And then we can connect it up. So now we will select our control here and then we will select our IK handle and we go to Constraint, pull vector. And it doesn't work because what was the error message? Constraint pull vector. Oops, I think I selected the wrong one. Here we go. So select the IK handle, constrain pull vector. Here we go. Now it works. So, select the control first, then the IK handle, then go to constrain pull vector. And we can see that it worked. First of all, we're not getting an error message. second of all we're getting this line now pointing towards the control. So if we moved it around we should be able to control the orientation of our elbow and it does work. I can set this back to zero. Then I'll go quickly through all of them and do it for the other ones too. So select the control, select the icon, little constrain pole vector. Here we go. And now you can use just the G key to apply the last used command or tool to the new selection. So what I mean by that is you can just select this control, select this eye candle, just press G and we'll kind of do the last action on whatever is selected now. That will kind of save you a few most moves of going into the constrained pole vector all the time. So you can just select the control, Select the eye candle, press G, and we'll apply that pole vector here for you. Then we want to take these pole vectors, controls, and also parent them under the appropriate groups here. So it is our right arm, I.K. Pole goes under right arm, left arm goes under left arm. We're going to also kind of apply the same what we talked about with leg. We can move the arm group a little bit closer here, like the two arms are together, two hands are together, and then the rest, and we'll apply our parentee right leg under the right leg group, and the left leg, I keep pulling the left leg group, and then everything is already nicely organized and parented in the spots where it needs to go here. And at this point, now that we've parented the eye handle control or IKHandle and we have connected the pole vector, we can actually go ahead and hide the IKHandles. We don't need to see those anymore and by hiding them, setting the visibility just to zero, it kind of makes it harder to move the IKHandle by accident, which we don't want to do anyway. So we should really only be using the control to move that around. So now we are done with the IK controls IK arms. So now we have to do as an X step would be to connect the blending, to connect those to the FK arm and the IK arm to our blend arm and we'll take a quick break and then we'll come back and continue from there.",
+  "segments": [
+    {
+      "text": " Okay, hello everybody and welcome back to week two, just workshop. Today I want to continue where we left off after week one, so we want to continue working on the arms, creating IKF cable and talking about the difference between using blend colors and versus orient constraints, then look at creating some hands and fingers and some macro and some secondary micro controls for the fingers perhaps, and then looking at foot setup with multiple pivot points and using utility and math notes a little bit along the way. So let's get started here and hide my GU again and continue where we left off. So for arms and legs it's usually a good idea to have IK and FK and a blending between the two so that animators can pick depending on what their needs are for that particular shot or moment and they can either animate in IK or in FK. IK is usually good for feet by default and then for arms when the arm or the hand is resting on something like a table and you want to be able to move your upper body without changing the position or orientation of the arm and same thing goes for the foot and the leg and and an FK is very good for you know any type of swinging motion so for example if the arm is kind of just hanging down you're having a walk cycle or something and you want the arm to just swing back and forth then FK is usually a better idea because you're getting this arc for free and the same thing is kind of true for the leg, if the characters for example hanging you know from a tree branch or a pole or something like that and the legs are in the air and you want the character to swing. It's usually better to animate that in forward kinematic, FK and rotation because again you're getting kind of this arc here for free, which is more natural and kind of what your own leg would do in such a case or the arm would kind of swing as opposed to, you know, IK, you would keyframe it in the back and then you would keyframe it in the front and would just linearly interpolate. And then you could perhaps come in and do another keyframe here in the middle, but then still it would kind of go linear from one keyframe to the other keyframe and then to the next keyframe. So you kind of get this angle here. then animators could come in and kind of tweak it, add more keys or tweak it in. The graph editor, the category, and this same roundness feeling, but it will be a lot harder than with FK. With FK, they just have to animate a rotation and they already have their arc. So it's much, much simpler that way. That's kind of the whole reason why it's a good idea to have both ways of animating in your rig and then a blend between the two so that animators can pick which one they want, they want or sometimes it's just a switch, you know, and in companies or later on you could add a script, you know, kind of a button click that switches between the two and also matches like a matching script, which most companies have, so that you can kind of match the IK to the FK and vice versa that they're very close and then you make the switch and then you can just continue animating in the other mode from that point on. So let's start with creating kind of a simple blend and show a couple of things here with that. So what I like to do is, although in Maya there is in the IK handle, when you're creating it there is already built-in an IKFK switch, but I found that it doesn't work too well, especially when you're keyframing and stuff like that. And you know, if you want to go back and forth between the two. So a lot of people that I know, they're using a three hierarchy system, which I want to show you hear, which you probably have, or perhaps have done before yourself, that's what I'm going with. And it's much more robust and controllable, I feel. So it has been around for a long time, but still kind of holding up. So what I'll do is I'll take the root of my hierarchy here, and I will just duplicate it two times. And I'll move it down a little bit each time. And the reason why I'm moving it down is just for visual purposes. Okay, later on we're going to snap them all that they're in the same position again But for now, I'll just move the first one the first to look it down a second down a little bit further And the one that I didn't change that's going to be my IK because the other one the FK one And the blended one those I can later on translate no problem after I've connected everything up But the IK one once the IK is in there and I start moving the route then the IK will kind of stay back and the arm will look tilted down, so it's much harder to move that around. Therefore, I'm not moving the IK and renaming properly or accordingly to that. I'll do the same thing here on the other arm as well, just so that we have it, and we can work on all four sides at the same time, to hit on the leg, move those out a little bit. And always the original one is going to be my IK. So now that we have those duplicated, we can start renaming everything properly. So here on the one that we didn't move, I'll change that to be my IK, or my IK root. And also the children here, my IKmit, my IK and the other two, it's not really important which way you name them. But I'll go with the furthest moved away, I'll use that as my FK. So arm FK and I'll remove the two and arm FK, arm FK end. And then the middle one, the one that's left, that's going to be our blended version. We could probably just leave the name as armroot, but that's kind of what we will be skinning to end the end or what we will use, that arm is blending between IK and FK and that's what we will continue building up upon, either we will skin to or we will create more advanced options here later on. But so for now I'll just call this blend on blend, mid on blend and I'll go through and I'll do the same here on the other ones as well while we're at it. IK, IK, IK. What you could also do, I mean it's not that bad here with the renaming yet, but what you could also look into is kind of doing a search and replace. So for example, if you go to modify search and replace names, you can just replace ARM with ARM FK in this case here, and then you can do the whole hierarchy. Here it's really only three joins and we still have to remove the two from the end, but But it's an alternative of renaming as opposed to clicking on every single one. And then here we would rename arm to arm blend and the whole hierarchy again, only three joins. Okay, and remove the one, making sure that, you know, because whenever there is a one or a two at the end, whenever I see that, it's kind of an indication that this was duplicated and not properly renamed on purpose. Okay, so there should always only be kind of the three letter extension. I know like ones or two, so 58 or whatever in the end, no numbering. Okay, so now we've named that and now we can do the same on the leg. Here, the two legs are kind of, you know, away from each other if we want to move them close so we can just take this group. We can kind of move it. If we get this one line, that's how we move. If we get kind of the box, that's how we parent. Okay. get the line, that's how we move things. So it didn't really change anything in terms of hierarchy. It just kind of changed the layout so that now the two legs are together, the two feet are together and then the body. So let's do the renaming here on this one. So we'll change leg to leg ik, rename it, and then the most outer one is going to be our fk. FK and the middle one is going to be our blend, Lake Blend. And I will remove the one at the end and the two at the end and making sure that everything is named properly now FK root, FK mid, FK end. So that's all good and the blending here, all the worked. And then same thing here on this last leg. So we'll change this to IK, the one that did not move. and then the most auto on the FK, FK, and then this is going to be our blend one. And we can remove the one and the two, and we should be done with it. Okay, and now the next point or next step would be to create our IK arms and legs. legs and the limbs here are very very similar. We can treat them exactly the same way. Then we can just kind of go four times around and do it on all four sides or work on all four at the same time. Two things that I kind of always watch out for and kind of like a sanity check or double check that everything was done correctly so far is making sure that there are no rotations on my IK joint or on any of these joints or any matter. On the the IK root, there should be no rotations, but I expected to have translations in x, y, c, and those translations are basically how much it is moved from the origin. If I were to set those to zero, then it would be end up at the origin, so we have to move it up that much. You know, we have to move it in x minus 14 units and y 129 units up, and then in z backwards minus 1.2 units to kind of end up exactly in that position. So I expect to see values if it's not at the origin here in all three, but on the second drawing I only expect one channel to have translation values, not the other two. And the reason why that should be is that's an indication that the orientation axes are correct, because if we go here and we switch our rotation tool to actually the translation tool, sorry, the translation tool to local, actually to object, to the object itself, then we can see this is kind of the axis that we picked, right? We said that the primary axis should be y here, and that means that it's facing to the child. So the child is actually going to be in that space, in the same space as the parent. So if we moved it along here in white, and we can see we can kind of extend it along the length of the joint. So we just want half of the joint, we can just move it kind of half that distance, and then we'll be in between those two positions here in a way. So that means also that 24.008, that's exactly the distance from this position to that position along this line, along that axis here. So the same thing is kind of true for this one here too. So this joint is moved 20.754 units from this joint along that axis, among the y-axis. That's kind of what we chose for our twisting, right, the primary axis. So no values on rotations on the root and on the mid-joint, and on the mid-joint only one translation value, or one channel having translation values. That's a sanity check, making sure that everything is correct so far. And then when we're creating our iK, I'm going to double check again to make sure that these still remain zero. If they change values, if they get small values or bigger values, that means that something is wrong with the orientation of those joints. And then I will check again a third time, last time after we've created our pole vector to still make sure that those didn't pick up any rotation values. And that kind of makes sure that everything is one plane, everything is set up properly and checking those along the way kind of makes sure that you don't break the whole arm and then later you discover it doesn't really work properly or there's some popping or flipping or whatever going on. This is just a way of setting up as clean as possible. So let's create our IK handles now for our IK arms, IK handle tool. And here we have to pick our rotate plane solver. So if we have reset our settings here, by default it's single chain or SC solver. But since we want to add a pull vector later on, we have to obviously pick our rotation planes over, RP. And now we go in and we create those IK handles. We can do it at the same time here for the other one too. And now if we moved it around, we can see that we can already bend our elbow. But it's also not a good idea to start moving the IK handle around because you will have a hard time getting it back to where it was before. So if you're doing a couple of steps here, we only did one steps so we can use undo but if you're doing a couple of steps and testing and maybe saving opening up your scene you will have a hard time getting this back because you cannot just zero this out you can see that it will end up somewhere else so how do you bring it back to that same position where it was before can eyeball it but now we'll always have kind of rotation values in here right so better would be using undo and not moving that at all then it should still be zero here we have actually some minus zeroes in here but it's okay minus zero or zero is kind of the same thing, as long as it doesn't have any numbers, any values in rotation. So instead of rotating or translating around the IK handle, we should probably create controls and freeze those controls out and then parent that and use the control instead of using the IK handle directly. It's much safer. I'll quickly go in and I'll finish up here by creating the IK handles also for the Lex. And whenever you're getting something like that, that means that the Xerra message means that we picked the wrong joint. We didn't really click on the end joint of the leg. We clicked on probably the start or root joint of the foot because they're so close together here. It's kind of, can happen easily. So there are two ways around that one way would be to kind of go in and for a moment hide the foot group here or the foot hierarchy. And by doing that, then we can, you know, now see where we want to click on and we're not getting or Maya's not getting confused with the foot. The other way would be to just do our IK in the outliner instead. So if we're going back to the last use tool, the IK handle, we can actually do it in here, we can come in here, go into our IK, expand it out, and then we just click on the leg, and then we command, or I think on Windows it's probably control, but here on my Mac it's command, click on the end, and that's also creating our IK handle for us, so you can see you can also do it in the Outliner, not only in the 3D viewport. Then we'll do the same thing for the left leg here as well, expand our IK, click with IK handle being active, click on the root, and then command click on the end, and now we have all four of our IK handles. Then I will start creating some controls for those, and start testing better. I'll clean it up here a little bit by taking these IK handles, and for now just moving them under the rig group, then I can take the whole rig and I can hide it, pressing h and I know I can start creating my control here for the IK arms and legs. So I'll go back to the CV curve tool, make sure that I'm still on linear and I will create a control for it. Just go for a simple cross here. I might take a pass later on at revising all these shapes of the controls but for now I something simple and quick. It doesn't take too long to create. So I'll go with that, show again my rig and position that where it needs to go. So we'll use snapping again, holding down V and snapping it to the end of the arm, rotating it 90 degrees, showing the geometry to see how big we need to scale it up. Perhaps to want to make sure that it is easy selectable and you know we can see it from kind of all over the back front top. Okay that could be good and then we'll duplicate that and using snapping again holding on B oops and translating it over here to the end of this arm. Then we'll duplicate it and make the same for the legs here. Here I will now actually go ahead and I will hide my feet groups for a second just so that I can snap properly to the end of the leg and not get confused that it might snap to somewhere else. So I'll use snapping and snap it to the end of the leg. And I'll snap this over here. here. We have our four controls. Then we can go ahead and we can freeze everything out. Now it is in right position, so we always want to freeze everything. And you can freeze either from, you know, here right clicking, freeze translation, rotation, scale or everything. Or it's kind of the same thing as if you go from here, modify, freeze transformations, and then with the option box, you can also kind of pick what you want to freeze, but if all the freezing everything, translation, rotation and scale, there's also this extra option for joint orient which I usually never use and then some extra options here that I also never change. So MediFault you can just come in here and modify freeze and I will kind of do the same thing as if you right click here and say freeze. And those freeze all will freeze everything or all the channels for translate rotation and scale. Not just what you have selected. Even if I click on visibility it doesn't really matter as long as I freeze all it will freeze everything here, you know, all the translation rotations and scales. So it's not depending on what you've selected. And so now we have to rename those guys, and I will go with a simple name here, write underscore arm ik control. And for the leg, I will change it to be write leg ik control. I want to kind of, you know, make a quick point about that. in Rix, I see that people name that not arm, but hand control. So they call it maybe hand IK, but it's not really for the hand. Yes, if you're translating this, it's moving the hand around, but only because the hand happens to be attached to the arm, right? But really, what you're doing here is you're controlling the arm IK. And the same thing for the leg. This is not really foot IK. It's the leg IK that you're controlling here, and the foot just happens to go along for the right because it is attached to the end of the leg, right? Or will be later on. So make sure that you get that straight. What is leg, what is foot, and what is arm, what is hand? The hand is really only this front part here that has all the fingers, or might have all the finger controls on it. And kind of we can bend the hand up and down and all of that, but translation really happens on the arm in IK. So then this would be the left IK control and left arm IK control. Okay, now we can do our color coding here. I want to be on the shape like we talked about Last week, I want to have this red. I'll pick bright colors for those sides. OK, red. And then blue for that side, also bright color. Here we go. And I know that I'm always on the shape, but because I've done it a lot of times now, but make sure that you're on shape to all the color coding on the shape, not on the transform because we don't want anything that will parent under it later on to inherit that same color. Okay, so done with that. And everything is frozen, everything is correct here on no values on those controls. Now we can start parenting these IK handles under the controls. So we'll set the IK handles, select the control, hit P, parent. Same thing here, parent, this one goes under this control and that I can, it goes under right control parent. Then the next thing, we can parent this to the appropriate groups. So I will take that and I will parent it under all control for sure, but then we can parent it even further. So the left leg IK should go under left leg group, right leg IK should go under right leg group and then we'll have to parent the arms that was under body spine I have to expand the whole spine because we have to get to the chest right chest that's where our arms are so right arm goes in the right arm group left arm goes in the left arm group and now we can already see that you know these groups or these modules packages ricks however you want to call them are filling up so here we have three hierarchies in there and a control so far, but it will come more later on. And having these groups here now kind of allows us to have this whole arm rig kind of separated or contained within each other. We can take this and we can move it around no matter where it is. And no matter how it is oriented, it will kind of always work on its own. Obviously, we want to see it out and have it in the position where we created it. but just kind of making the point about how contained it is. And it's just an arm rig. And later on what we're going to do is we're going to connect these hands to the arms and the arms to the shoulders. So we might change it a little bit up that it's not so self-contained anymore. But for now it is. And that's important because then you can, for example, go in and you can delete, just select the arm group here, delete it. And that gets rid of everything that kind of belongs to the arm. And we can now start creating a new arm or different arm or whatever here, and kind of swap out the different pieces here very easily and kind of work on the rig parts in isolation. Now we wanna create our pole vectors here. So now that we have that control and we can easily kind of go back by searing out that control, we also wanna have a control to kind of, you know, change our elbow orientation or where that elbow is pointing towards. On the IKHandle we have a twist attribute that we could connect to something, you know, but I think it's always a lot better if animators are actually having a control that it can position in space and that the elbow will always point towards it. So typically I don't really use that twist here on the IKHandle. I rather create a pole vector control. So let's do that. Let's go with something simpler. Again, later on I might swap those shapes around. And whenever you rig, you know, when you test, make sure you always set everything back to the way how it was by default before you continue rigging. That will make things a lot easier and, you know, well, much cleaner. So let's take this NURBS circle that I just created here from, create NURBS circle. So even if you go for a circle, that's essentially also nothing else than a CV curve, okay? or a curve, a NURBS curve, so circle. So we'll kind of follow the same rules if I come here and I say show NURBS curves, I can hide all the controls here with one click. And now I'll take this circle and I will move it up to the elbow of my IK. We'll maybe make it a little bit bigger, rotate it 90 degrees, scale it up to five, and I will freeze it in that position. freeze, translate, or actually freeze everything, freeze all, and then I will move it back. And here what you can see is I'm just translating it in Z. When I'm doing that, I can still guarantee that it's looking from the front, it's going to be in the same plane as these joints because we created these joints from the top, so we know that they're all in one plane, one straight line, or plane looking from the front here, and by just translating this back in Z, we can also guarantee that all four points are on the same plane, the root joint, mid joint, the end joint, and that pole vector here, pole vector control. Everything is on the same plane. And that's going to be important so that when we are connecting the pole vector to the IK handle, that it doesn't change the orientation of our joints here. If you create your IK, your pole vector, and it changes the orientation, that's an indication that something is wrong with not everything is in the same plane here. And that's why it's also easier if you start with your character in a T-pose as opposed to having some weird rotation on your elbows in the model already or something, because then it will be really hard figuring out where you have to position this control in order for those rotations not to change. So let's move that back a little bit and just inside and what I found a good distance as a default distance is kind of like one arm length or for the leg one leg length. So if we go from the root to the end, that's kind of the length of the arm and then I'll just apply that inside kind of the same distance. If it's too close, then it tends to flip very easily as soon as you start moving the arm around And if it's too far back, then it kind of loses its connection or visual thing here. Then, you know, animators might forget about it or it's too far away. And they can always move it closer or farther away later on if they have to. But the default I found, it's a good way to have kind of one arm length here. So maybe we'll pick a round value here of minus 40. Seems to be okay. And I'm picking round values so that when I duplicate it and apply it to the other side, I can kind of use the same value here. So you can just apply minus 40 in Z and then I know that they're going to be in exactly the same position here looking from the side. Then I'll freeze those two guys, freeze all because that's going to be our final position for those. Actually, I forgot something. I wanted to change that here up a little bit so I'll go ahead and I'll delete it one more time. And before I duplicate them, I will make them not like the default circle, but I'll take every other CV point here and move those in and create this kind of diamond shape to make them a little bit more unique looking. And then I'll take this duplicated snap it using V key to the elbow here. And then again, I know that I used 40 or minus 40 on that one. So I can just apply my minus 40 again and now freeze it here, freeze translates and freeze translates, making sure that everything is at the default. Here we have one other thing because we created that circle, the first circle from a sphere. We also have some construction history because it was made out of a nerve circle and we froze history so it's creating all these nodes for us. So what I'll also do on these controls is I will go edit delete by type history and that will get rid of these nodes because otherwise Maya always has to evaluate it whenever you start doing anything with this control and these four nodes might not make a big difference but if you have three nodes here and two nodes there and four extra nodes there then it will kind of add up so we want to try to to keep this rig as lean and as mean as possible with no extra baggage so that the performance can be as fast as possible and nothing is there to slow the rig down. It's kind of unnecessary. So let's take this, duplicate it and move it down here to the knee and kind of do the same thing. We'll freeze it in that position at the knee and then we can go from there and kind of just translated forwards just in set making sure that it's still in the same kind of you know plane we don't want to move it to the side or up and down or anything up and down would still be fine because it's still in the same plane too but moving left and right that will kind of deviate from that plane that we have so I really only move it from the knee forwards and then again I kind of see how long the leg is and kind of apply that moving forward so perhaps here 60 could be a good value. Okay, duplicate, snap it to the other knee and also move it forward 60 units. And we can freeze everything here. Freeze, translates. And that one here too, freeze the translates on that as well. So now we froze everything, we deleted the history, should be all nice and clean. Now we can start renaming those controls and then color coding them. Here I will rename this to be something very, very similar or in line with this control. Here we have right arm IK control, because it's controlling the IK of the arm, the right arm. So this one I'll call almost the same right arm IK control. I will call this right arm IK pull control. And we could also potentially call this elbow, but then it's only really the elbow, or it's only going to be the elbow when we're in IK mode, right, it's really only for the IK. So we could call it elbow IK, but then whenever you wanna select it via script or something like that or here with the wildcard, you always kind of have to type elbow and arm IK. While with this, you can actually select all the arm IK controls or all the right arm IK controls, all the ones, you know, or all the IK pull controls, one. So it's very similar or very easy to be consistent to select multiple things at the same time. So I found that to be quite handy. So now I'll change that to be left arm ik poll. And we might change that later on. We can always change these names in the end if we want to, I'd be with them, but now let's go with those names. Right leg IK, pole control, and then left leg IK, pole control. And then the next thing that we want to do is apply our color coding scheme here to the shapes. So that should be red. This should be blue. That should be blue. That should be right again. This is the right side, right? Here we go. And then we can connect it up. So now we will select our control here and then we will select our IK handle and we go to Constraint, pull vector. And it doesn't work because what was the error message? Constraint pull vector. Oops, I think I selected the wrong one. Here we go. So select the IK handle, constrain pull vector. Here we go. Now it works. So, select the control first, then the IK handle, then go to constrain pull vector. And we can see that it worked. First of all, we're not getting an error message. second of all we're getting this line now pointing towards the control. So if we moved it around we should be able to control the orientation of our elbow and it does work. I can set this back to zero. Then I'll go quickly through all of them and do it for the other ones too. So select the control, select the icon, little constrain pole vector. Here we go. And now you can use just the G key to apply the last used command or tool to the new selection. So what I mean by that is you can just select this control, select this eye candle, just press G and we'll kind of do the last action on whatever is selected now. That will kind of save you a few most moves of going into the constrained pole vector all the time. So you can just select the control, Select the eye candle, press G, and we'll apply that pole vector here for you. Then we want to take these pole vectors, controls, and also parent them under the appropriate groups here. So it is our right arm, I.K. Pole goes under right arm, left arm goes under left arm. We're going to also kind of apply the same what we talked about with leg. We can move the arm group a little bit closer here, like the two arms are together, two hands are together, and then the rest, and we'll apply our parentee right leg under the right leg group, and the left leg, I keep pulling the left leg group, and then everything is already nicely organized and parented in the spots where it needs to go here. And at this point, now that we've parented the eye handle control or IKHandle and we have connected the pole vector, we can actually go ahead and hide the IKHandles. We don't need to see those anymore and by hiding them, setting the visibility just to zero, it kind of makes it harder to move the IKHandle by accident, which we don't want to do anyway. So we should really only be using the control to move that around. So now we are done with the IK controls IK arms. So now we have to do as an X step would be to connect the blending, to connect those to the FK arm and the IK arm to our blend arm and we'll take a quick break and then we'll come back and continue from there."
+    }
+  ]
+}