Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

In this lesson, we'll add extra joints for toe bend control. So as of right now, we have no way of bending the toes. And we'll want that control in. That way we can get some really nice follow-through and a nice push-off as we animate the robot for whatever will be while required of him. So to get started, what we'll do is go ahead and first rename each of our toe chains. We're going to rename them with a prefix of JNTDRV. That way, it's clear that these joints are to drive our auxiliary joints we're about to build. So it's just a matter of grabbing each of our roots and heading over to Modify, Search and Replace Names. Let's go ahead and reset our settings. We'll search for JNT and replace with JNTDRV. Let's make sure that hierarchy is the choice we use. That way, when we go ahead and run the tool, everything that needs to be renamed is renamed, not only the object, but nodes tied to the object. Great. So now, at this point, what we'll want to do is grab our B joints of both toe chains. And let's go ahead and duplicate them. We don't need these extra parent constrain nodes. So what we could do is go ahead and optimize our scene, just removing any extra constraints. So we'll move over to the optimize options. We'll find constraints. Choose Optimize Now. If we were to take a look at our Script Editor, you'll find that four nodes were removed. Great. So now, we can go ahead and take the radius and bring this up just a little bit more so it's easier to select these joints. We can always work with a value of three just to round them out. And we don't need these end joints at all. So we could always hit the Down Arrow and go ahead and delete those extra joints. So we really just need these base joints. So next step is to go ahead and rename these. So we're going to use the same naming scheme that these joints had originally. So we'll remove the DRV. And that's going to be Toe AB01. I'll go to the next joint, do the same, and remove the DRV. All right, now, as far as parenting these, these will get parented not to the joints they are on top of. Otherwise, when we go ahead and rotate the ball joint, the toes will rotate down. Remember our foot roll reg. Need to make sure that it will function properly even with these extra joints added. So instead of parenting these two-- again, the joints directly above them-- we'll go ahead and have them parented to the end joints of this chain. So that's going to be JNT toe end. So I'll go ahead and start with Toe A. With that selected, we'll parent to JNTDRV End. We'll do the same thing for the next one. And it's as simple as that. So now we have full control over rotating our toe. And now as we go ahead and rotate our ball up, because of these objects being parented to the toe, the to mesh will not penetrate through our floor. So it's the same process for the right side. Just follow the same steps and you'll be able to do it just fine again. We go through and we duplicate our Toe B joints. And then at that point, we can go ahead and remove the extra parent constraint nodes. We can increase the radius, remove the end joints that get duplicated along with them, and then go ahead and parent them to our end joints here. And we also want to make sure they're renamed. So following that, in the next lesson, we're ready to start connecting geometry together.