Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

Let's spend a little bit of time organizing our rig. So before we get too far and eventually clutter our Outliner, it's a good idea to create a type of grouping hierarchy. That way, it's a lot easier to access objects. And at the same time, this grouping hierarchy node we're about to import will also serve as a temporary global control. We can use this control to reposition, reorient, or even resize our robot if needed. So again, it's a very efficient way to work, a very clean way to work. We'll go to the File menu and choose Import. We'll take a look at our options. We're just working with the Default settings. So I'll go ahead and now import the character group node file in. You'll find that under your assets folder. So let's go ahead and bring that in. And this is really basic. Let's go ahead and expand it. We can go ahead and hold Shift to Expand All. What you'll find is a character node at the top. So when we collapse this, you can see how clean everything is. But when it's expanded, within it holds things like our mesh. So you'll find this model node. This is primarily for the characters that are skinned. In our case, since our robot is referenced in, we don't need to be concerned with this node. Underneath that, we have our extra nodes group. So this is what will hold any objects that the animator or anyone using the file will not need to be concerned with. We may eventually want to hide this extra nodes group. Then we have our global move group. So this is what we would use to globally transform the entire robot. Not actually transform, but change the position, reorient, and resize this asset. Underneath, we have groups for our IKs, joints, and control objects. Then, we also have this blendShape node. We may not need that for this character. However, you may find that you will want to use a corrective shape for a few pieces. It's really up to you, but you're going to have them stored in the blendShapes group. All right, so with that said, what we could do is just spend a little bit of time removing these name spaces, just go through and delete the name space prefixes. Shouldn't take too much time at all. And now once we're finished with that, we'll go ahead and rename our top node which is currently named character node. Let's go ahead and rename it to something more convenient for our robot, maybe something along the lines of awesome robot node or something like that, All right, so let's say we go ahead and go to this top node. And what I'm going to go ahead and do is rename it to transformingrobot_node. OK, great. All right, so what are we going to store in here? Well, we have a few IKs. Let's go ahead and grab them and add them to the IKs group under global move. As far as our control objects, we know they're going to be stored underneath the controls group. So we'll go ahead and parent them there. And we'll grab the hip joint and add that to our joints group. All right, so if we were to go ahead and collapse this now, notice how clean everything is. It's very important, especially when working with several assets, to just keep things as organized as possible just to avoid the headache of having to pick through several objects that aren't organized, that don't have this type of structure. All right, so we now have our group hierarchy prepared. We can now go ahead and start to refine our foot rig. And in the next lesson, we will start to work on creating a more elaborate foot roll for our robot.