Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

Let's build our robot's hip joint and mirror its leg chain. So we'll move over to our side view, and I'll use Shift-A to view all in each panel. Move over to our side view, and grab our joint tool. If we were to take a look at our settings, they are the default settings. So let's make sure our tool is reset. And staying in wire frame mode, we'll just go in and just create our hip joint right at the center of our hip groove. OK. That looks pretty good. You might want to bring it down just a little bit lower. OK, great. And I'll go ahead and take the radius up to about 10. Make it really large or easy to grab. And we can go ahead and rename it. So this is going to jnt_hip01. Let's view its local rotation axis handle. We want to keep our orientation consistent, so looking at our leg, we can see x is pointed down the chain. Now the spine is moving in a different direction. So still, we'll want x to move down the chain. But for the case of our spine, we'll want to have x pointed up. So we can go ahead and change this very quickly in our Attribute Editor. Now, when you switch over to your Attribute Editor-- if you see that it's blank, it's just a matter of toggling your Attribute Editor until your object loads up. So sometimes that happens. It might even be a matter of just re-selecting the object. But no worries. What I'll now do is go ahead and move over to the joint-orient Z attribute, and go ahead and set this to 90 so x can point upward. Now, you can see with our leg, y is pointing forward, but again, that x is moving in the opposite direction. So in this case, we'll just have y point behind the hip. So we'll just go to our joint-orient x channel and set this to -90. All righty. So now we can go ahead and grab our left leg and parent that to the hip. Great. Another thing I'd like to bring up is that you can see how the robot naturally has a slant in his spine. So when we rotate in our twist axis, at least for the chest, we'll want to make sure that we get some really nice rotation so we can keep this angle of the torso as it twists around. So I"ll show you how to do that. For the hip it's fine, but for the chest, we'll want to take care of that. All right. So I'll now go ahead and grab the thigh root. And with that selected, we can go ahead and work on mirroring our chain across. So let's ahead and head over to our mirror joint tool under the skeleton menu, and I'll reset things. OK. So at the top, we're going to mirror across the y-z plane. So we'd like to mirror over. Now, for our mirror function, let's use behavior. That way, we get a mirroring effect as we rotate both chains. We'll not change the orientation at all of the mirror chain. Now, search for and replace with-- we can use this to speed up the time it takes to rename the other half. So if you recall, we've been using _L_ to identify the left side objects. So that's what we're going to search for, _L_, and we want to replace with _R_ for the right. We can now go ahead and choose mirror, and you can see that for the most part, everything has been renamed. I say for the most part, because the effector will also need to be renamed. That's no problem at all. The tool still saves us a lot of time. So let's go ahead and head over to our Outliner. See the [? icades ?] have been renamed, so that's good. But we'll need to go ahead and expand our right thigh chain. So I'll just go ahead and shift-click to Expand All. There is the effector. We'll rename this to EFFRLEG01. OK. So we are good to go. That's all we had to do for this lesson, just go ahead and create a hip joint and mirror our leg over. So we're making great progress. And now that the foundation of the legs have been built, we're now ready to start thinking about a control system. So we're going to go ahead and start working on a foot roll rig in the next lesson.