Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

Let's add Toe Bend Controls. So we do have our Curve Offset Objects that we can use to animate Toe Bends if we'd like. We can consider what we're about to build an extra level of control. That way, we can use these Curved Offset Objects to separate the Toe Mesh, whereas the controls we're about to create will be tied directly to our Toe Bending joints. All right. So it's just a way of grabbing these a lot faster for animation. Let's go ahead and get started by grabbing our CV Curve Tool with it set to Linear, and we'll go ahead and create a square shape, as we've done before. We'll have it right at the origin of our scene, that way we don't need to center the pivot on it. But if it is offset, feel free to just go ahead and use the Center Pivot tool. And now, we'll need to align it to our Toe Joint, so we'll start with the left side. And we have a script we can use to have that happen at a faster pace. Let's go ahead and open up our Script Editor, and we will load in our Match Transforms tool. Here it is. All right. So what this will do is match the position and orientation of the first selection to the second. So we first graph our source, and then the target. So we use a Parent Constraint for that. And then we use the Less Relatives command, stored in this variable here, to find the Parent Constraint node of the first selection. We delete the Parent Constraint node, and then we go and select the first selection. All right. So let's go ahead and highlight this. Add it to our shelf. Head over to our Script Editor. And we can go ahead and rename this. It's just a matter of cropping some of the title, so I've removed the end and a little bit of the beginning, all of these common marks. All right. So we're left with Match Transforms Position Orientation tool. Let's go ahead and copy the name. Use that as our tool tip. And for the instructions, we'll say first, select source, then target. And we'll label this MTT. All right. So to put this to good use, with our curve selected first, we'll grab our Toe Bend Joint, which is JNT L Toe A. And we'll use MTT. And you'll see that the curve has now been aligned to the position and orientation of the selected object. All right. Let's go ahead and duplicate this and align to the next joint, which is Toe B. All right. With both curves selected, we can go to Shaded mode. And in Object mode, we'll go ahead and move these up in the y-axis and move them down in the x, and then we can go ahead and scale them up a little bit larger. And then feel free to go ahead and rotate them down, just so that their ankle matches the slant of the toe geometry. It's not necessary, and you don't need to do that step, but I think it makes the control itself look a little bit cleaner. Either way, with both of them selected, we can go ahead and mirror these across with our Mirror tool. So you can see that saves us a lot of time. And now what we'd want to do is parent the Shape nodes of these curves to our Toe Bend Joint. So let's go ahead and take a look at a Parent Shape tool we can use. We'll go ahead and load in the Parent Shape tool. There it this. And to take a look at this code, this will, first, after finding our selection, check to make sure we have two objects selected. And if we do, then it will parent the first selection to the second, and then it will freeze the transforms of the first selection. That way, when we parent the first selection Shape node, nothing shifts. All right. Following that, we find our Shape node and we go ahead and rename it to the first selection with a prefix of SHP. So this will take care of renaming for us. And then the Shape node of the first selection will be parented to the second selection. Afterwards, we go ahead and remove the empty Transform node that's left behind after we extract the Shape node from the first selection. And then, finally, we go ahead and select the Parent Object, which is the second selection. Let's go ahead and highlight this and add it to our shelf. What we'll also do is load up just one more tool, and that is to select Shape nodes. So I'll go ahead and choose Open. All right. And again, all this does is it grabs the Shape node of the object we have selected. So if we want to recolor these objects, we can go ahead and use this script. All right. So I'll go ahead and break down the code for you. Again, we find our selection, and then we go ahead and grab the Shape node and then we select the Shape node-- really straightforward. So I'll go ahead and add that to the shelf. Then we can head over to our Shelf Editor to rename these. So go into the first one, the Parent Shape tool. We'll rename it just that. This is our Parent Shape Tool. All right. Let's go ahead and copy its name. Use that as the tool tip. And for the instructions, we first select our source, then the target. The icon label, that will be PST. All right. So for our Select Shape tool, we'll rename it just that. Select Shape Tool. All right. So for the tool tip, that's going to be select the object that holds the Shape node. And then we can go ahead and rename this to sshp. All right. So let's go ahead and start to work with these tools. We'll go ahead and start with this first curve here, on Toe A. With that selected, we'll now Shift select JNT Toe A, and go ahead and run our Parent Shape tool. So you can see we're just left with our shape, and it's been renamed. So that saves us a lot of time. Let's go ahead and take care of the next curve. Again, with that selected, we grab our joint and parented shape. OK. Now, with both of these curves selected, let's go ahead and clean up our channels. We'll just go ahead and remove our Translate channels, Scale, and Visibility. Just right-click, Lock, and Hide Selected. All right. Now, as far as color coding these is concerned, what we could do is use our Select Shape tool. So let's go ahead and run that. Notice the Shape node is selected. We can now head over to our Attribute Editor. That's going to be Object Display, Drawing Overrides. And we'll use that same color of blue. OK. We'll go ahead and take care of the next one. Again, select the Shape node and recolor this one to blue. The right side will be red. OK. Now we're ready to work on the right side. So again, it's the same process here. We grab our curve, we grab our joint object, run the Parent Shape tool. Then, if you like, feel free to go ahead and select the shape and color this one red. And let's go ahead and take care of this last one. And then after that, we'll need to clean up our channels. So that's just a matter of grabbing both curves, heading over to the Channel box, and we will Lock and Hide our Translate, Scale, and Visibility attributes. Great. All right. So we have an extra level of control for banging the toe, so if this robot needs to run, we can get some more follow-through by animating the toes, which will help to loosen up this very rigid robot, which is very important for an appealing performance. Though it's a robot, we don't want him to move too mechanical. We went to have a good sense of personality in his gestures. All right. Great. Well, that's going to finish this lesson. In the next lesson, we're ready to work on our knee controls.