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Chapter List
Page Three
Neck and Head
Page Four
Attaching Neck/Spine
Page Five
Begin Orient Constraints
Page Six
Orients Continued
Page Seven
Pelvis, Leg, and Foot
Page Eight
Clavicle, Arm, and Hand
Page Nine
Arm, and Hand continued
Page Ten
Keeping Things Organized
Page Eleven
Character Skinning, Part One
Page Twelve
Character Skinning, Part Two
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Beginning with the side view is where I create the spine. I suggest always starting with the spine,
as do most people. This is where all animation begins, so why not start there. I draw the
the joints on the outside this time more for you. It doesn't really matter, because there is
plenty of modifications you have to do. On another note, never plan on drawing a joint and expecting it to
be perfect on the first try.
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The handy little white field on the left of the picture is called the "Outliner". Get used to
seeing it here, and start using it a lot. The hypergraph is nice to look at but very limited
when working in an orderly fashion. With the amount of bones you'll see being put into Phil here,
you'll want a nice and quick way to get to all you need.
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Quick placement of the joints, just grab the bottom one and put it
where the sacrum is located. Maya names all duplicate or identical objects
numerically. So you should name everything in an easy to remember fashion,
but with a "1" at the end of every object. That way if you have multiples
of joints, or objects, you can see what needs to be fixed easier.
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We are working on the spine so we'll begin with a series of spine names.
Name the joints as follows...
spineJA_1
|_spineJB_1
|_spineJC_1
|_spineJD_1
|_spineJE_1
|_spineJEnd_1
The arrow is pointing to the handy little layout buttons on the left side of Maya 4.0.
The outliner is easily accessed here.
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Picture Five shows you the channel box on the right. Rotate Z is highlighted, for my skeleton
I want it to rotate backwards in -Z, and forwards in +Z. Select the spineJA_1 and then type
this into the mel command area at the bottom of the screen.
select -hi;
This grabs all the joints in the heirarchy so you can see if they all bend in the same direction.
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Rotating all the joints in hiearchy fashion show us quickly, that some of your bones are
rotating in the wrong direction. In this case, some of the Joint Orients are 180 degrees
out from the positions that you want them in.
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Now we open up the most used editor for the skeleton. The attribute editor has a location for
something called Joint Orient. All orients in X,Y,Z respectively. In the case of my spine here,
spineJB_1 and spineJF_1 the X orients are 180 degrees off. Just type in 0 and this should make them
rotate correctly down the -Z axis.
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You can see all the joints are rotating the correct way. This is a highly exaggerated
motion for a spine, but the same idea will apply to the hands later.
Finally another thing to tell you about is the number of joints you use on the spine
only matters for how much control you want. You will usually prefer, after some
experimentation, to make the bones all the same length.
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------ IMPORTANT ------
Only lengthen bones along their X translate axis. Only the base spine joint should have more than
one translate value. Any actual placement of a bone is done by moving the Joint Orient in the
Attribute Editor. This is very easy if you select the box in the Joint Orient [Z for example]
and then hold the Control button and use your MMB to move it around.
Remember to name the last joint in a chain with an "End" like I showed you above.
Then go to this "End" joint and ZERO all the Orients out. Just to keep things clean.
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To the right is an animation showing the use of the Joint Orient box
when you select the box and use MMB drag to make it move. Once again,
the reason for this is to keep all the rotate values at 0,0,0 for now.
It is just a very nice thing to type in 0,0,0 into the Rotate values
and have your bones snap back to a preset position.
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