Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

Let's finish the base rig of the robot's leg. So we only have a few more things to do before we're ready to mirror our leg chain over. We have the toes to create and then we'll build in an IK solver. All right, so getting started, what I like to do from time to time is just check the pivot on the assets that we're about ready to rig. I don't mine the pivots of the end toe meshes, but to the base meshes, I think that I can go ahead and fix the pivots on these by simply centering them. And might as well add that tool to our shelf, as well as a few other very common use tools. So under modify we can go ahead and add center pivot. We'll also go ahead and add freeze transformations. I'm just holding down Control-Shift and left clicking. And we'll also add the delete by type history tool. All righty. So at this point we can now go in and center the pivots of these two-toe base meshes. And that's just to prepare for animation. Might as well take care of that now. All right now as far as the joints we'll need for the toes, again we'll work with our CJNT tool. So I'd like the joint for this first toe to be placed right underneath the ankle. Right about the end of this mesh, closest to the heal. So let's go to our edge selection. We'll grab the two edges on the right side of this mesh, and do the same thing for the opposite end. So we can create a joint between this selection. All right, feel free to increase the radius on this, maybe to a value of two. I think that's going to work. All right, and then following that we can go ahead and create a joint for the end toe mesh. So I'll go ahead an grab all of its components and create a joint at the radius to two. All right, we are going to want this joint to be placed right where the end of the toe would hinge from. But first let's go ahead and work on creating the orientation of our base joint. That way we can go ahead and just move this end joint back locally in the X, and it'll follow the angle of the toe geometry. All right, so what we'll go ahead and do is select both toe joints, and go ahead and show their local rotation handles to keep track of their orientation. All right, so making sure we have the end joint selected first we'll go ahead and grab our root joint. Then we'll go ahead and run the JXYZ tool, and we'll choose apply. All right so now it's just a matter of grabbing the end joint. Let's go ahead and parent that to the root joint. You can see now we can go ahead and move back locally in the x-axis. Make sure your move tool is set to local mode. So you can do that. So we can start to just move this joint back, so it's placed exactly where we'd like it to be. And then we'll probably want it to hinge right at the base of the end toe mesh. So we'll go ahead and just move it down into place. So right at about this spot here I think would be just fine. All right. So following that we'll now need to create a joint for the end. So in order to do that what I'd recommend doing is zeroing the orientation of the end joint. So go ahead and use CJNT for that. Or if you like, we can go ahead and take a look at another tool that will zero out the orientation without looking for a name constraint. So I'll just head over to the script editor, choose load script. It'll go ahead and load in the reset joint tools. So that's reset joints ori. All right, so what this is going to do is it is basically going to take all of the joints in our selection. We use a for loop for that. So there is our selection variable. And we use a for loop. So for all of the objects selected we go ahead and run the command to zero out the joints orientation, and zero out it's rotate channels. So let's go ahead and highlight all of this, add this to our shelf. Feel free to add this tool right next to your other joint orient tools just to stay organized. And go into the shelf editor, we can go ahead and rename this to reset joint tool. I'm going to copy that, use that as the tool tip. And we'll rename this to RJT. Choose save all shelves. So whatever joints we have selected, if we'd like to zero out their orientation, set both rotation and joint orient attributes to 0, we can go and use this. So let's go ahead and run it. Grab our joint. And the tool looks like we have a little error. Ah. And that's simply because this end curly bracket was not added. All right, so no worries. I'll just go ahead and highlight everything. You see the benefit of working with show errors in mind. Which is under the history menu. So show line numbers in errors. If we go ahead and use that it will go ahead and find whatever issues we may have in our code. So I'm just going to use control-A to grab everything. Press control-C to copy, head over to our tool we've just added, RJT. Right click and choose edit. I'll highlight everything here, press control-V to paste, and then we'll be just fine. We can just go ahead and save out our shelf. Close this out. And now when we run our tool it's going to go ahead and clean up the orientation of that end joint. All right, great. So at this point what I'd like to do is go ahead and duplicate this, just move this down. It's at the very end. You move it up just a little bit more. All right. So now I want to go ahead and take that very end joint and parent it to the joint before it. Great. And we're good to go. All right, so at this point let's go ahead and duplicate this toe chain. So we can move it across, move it over. So it's going to be kind of tricky to move this joint to the exact spot the root should be at. So what we could always do is go ahead and quickly create a joint to snap to. So remember what we did to create the initial toe joint at the base? Let's go ahead and use the same steps. All right, so we'll grab these four edges. And use the CJNT tool. All right, so now we can go ahead and grab our toe base joint. Let's go to wireframe mode. Just go ahead and vert snap over to the joint we've just created. And now we no longer need the joint we've just made, so we'll go ahead and delete that. And we can just go ahead and work on making sure this chain is centered. So I'll go ahead and rotate it over in the y-axis, just to straighten it up. So it's following the same angle as the toe. And now it's just a matter of cleaning up its orientation, and we know how to do that. What I'll do is go ahead and grab the end root joint of the toe. And I'll just go ahead and unparent it. Now with the toe root selected, we could go ahead and use RJT to clean up the joint. We'll need to make sure it's reset. Again, so the joint gets oriented properly. We can now go ahead and grab the toe joint we just unparented, and then grab our toe base joint, and use the joint orient tool. Or our reorient joint tool, go ahead and choose apply. And then we can go ahead and grab the toe end and parent it to the toe base, and everything should be good to go. Everything's still clean. Great. Let's go ahead and grab these toe base objects, and parent to our ankle. All right so now they're part of the leg hierarchy. As far as renaming these, I'm going to show you the renaming tool I was telling you about. Just go back to our script editor and choose load script. And we'll find rename it. All right. so let's go ahead and open that up. So we have here is a tool that will go in and it'll create a window for us. And then we run a for loop. So for each object in our selection variable-- $cell-- we create a name field for that object and that queries the object's name, and we also have a field to rename the object. And then we have a close button to close a window out when we're finished. And then the last thing this does we'll go ahead and show the window. So I'm just going to go ahead and highlight this. I'm going to click and drag, add it to our shelf. Head over to the shelf editor, and let's go ahead and rename this to the renamer tool. For the icon label we could always name that to rename it. Oh, actually for the tool tip, that is. I'll just go ahead and cut and paste. And then for the icon label let's go under abbreviated. Just simply rename it to R&M. All right, so if we go ahead and select these in order, let's say, starting with the first toe joints we've made, then going to the next side, and we run this tool, notice we have a name field that gives us the name of the object currently. And then we can go ahead and rename these. So using this tool, we can get specific names, which I like. All right. So going in, starting from the base, we'll go ahead and rename that to JNT_L_ToeA01. Oh, following that, before the 01 let's go ahead and put another underscore and a lowercase a. So this is going to be set a, and then the next toe is set b. So going to copy that. Go to the next joint. And that's going to be toe ab. And then for the end joint, this is going to be JNT end, toe a c. All right? So now go ahead and copy that. Go ahead and paste, and this one, again, is set b. So that's going to be toe ba copy, paste. b. And then the last one there is going to be toe b. We do want to put the prefix JNT end to define it as an end joint. And that will be c01. So we can now go ahead and close this out, and each of these have now been renamed. All right let's go ahead and build an IK for this leg in mirrored across. So we'll use a Rotate Plane solver. Something important to keep in mind is that given that we don't really have a ball joint for the ankle, we'll need to make sure that we set up our knee control in a way that will reflect that. So that we are building this based off of the robot's design. OK? The robot was built to function a certain way. So we need to make sure our rig will withhold the design that was planned out for this character. All right. So with that said I'll head over to skeleton, the IK handle tool. Resetting the settings will work with the rotate plane solver, and will connect from our thigh to the ankle. All right, let's go ahead and rename the IK handle to RPLLegs01. And just about finished. Let's go ahead and from there move over to the outliner. So we can rename the end effector that's tied to the ankle. So we'll just go ahead and expand our leg chain. There's the effector. We'll rename that to EFFLLegs01. Later we'll go in and create a hierarchy for all of these objects that we are adding. All of these joints, and the controls. We need to make sure that we organize them in our scene. So we'll go ahead and do that shortly. But all right. We have our leg chain built. I'd say it's a good time to stop the lesson. So in the next lesson we'll build a head joint, and we'll go ahead and mirror this across, and connect the legs to our hip.