Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

Let's add a hip control. We'll create the another square-shape curve, and we can use that as our hip control. Let's get right to work. We'll use our CV Curve tool and we'll just snap to grid. OK. So now that we have the shape, we can rename it. It's going to be cchip01. Now I'll move it into place. Let's rotate it 90 degrees in the x-axis so it faces towards us. And we'll just move this up so it's right in front of our hip. Now very quickly, we'll check to make sure our Move tool is set to local mode so we can get an idea of the true axis of this control. Whereas with Object mode, it's not totally accurate. So I'll just, again, switch back over to Local mode. Let's scale this object up. And then feel free to go to the Component level of it and reshape it further, maybe taper the end and kind of pull that in, so it flows with the angle of the hip. You don't need to spend too much time, of course. I'd say that looks pretty decent. Great. So the next step is to make sure that the pivot is in place. So I'll just hold down the D key and vert snap to our hip joint. OK, great. Now it is hard to see right now, so again, that's another reason why we went to color-code our control objects. So what I'll do is use yellow for all of the upper body controls, everything in the center. We'll head over to our Attribute editor and we'll take care of that. OK, great. We do want to clean up its transforms, so we'll freeze transformations on it. And we'll want this to be stored in our Controls group. Now as far as connecting our hip joint to this control, let's take a look at another tool we can use. This one is going to create a locator. And its transforms are not going to be zeroed out. Instead, we can think of it as a transform tracker, or we can just keep an eye on the transforms of the joints we are constraining. So to take a look at this, we'll head over to our script editor and load in our Match Locator tool. There it is. So opening this up, we've seen a lot of this before. We find our selection. We check to make sure our selection size equals 2. If it does not, we get a warning. And if it does, it'll go in and create a locator, and then we use our Tokenize command to rename the locator to locoffset plus the name of the object we are constraining. And then next, we parent constrain our locator to our second selection, which is the child. In our case, it's going to be our hip joint. That's how we keep track of its orientation, via this parent constraint. Then we no longer need the parent constraint once the locator's been aligned, so we find it and delete it. Next, we make sure the locator's paired to our first selection, which is going to be our animation control. We create a size parameter and then we tie the local scale of our locator into that size channel, in order to resize it. And then lastly, we parent constrain with a maintain offset our second selection, which is our joint, to our locator. And then last thing this will do is select the locator. So let's highlight all of this, and we'll add it to our shelf. We'll right-click on our icon. Let's head over to Edit, Shelves. And this is our Match Locator Control tool. So we can always trim some of this name off. I'll copy that, use that as a tool tip, and again with this one, we would first select our target object, then the source. And then we'll label the icon MLC. Just save this out, and put it to use. So we grab our hip control, we grab our joint, run our tool. So you can see the locator's been made, and we know exactly what the [? transforms ?] are of our joint object, which has now been constrained. Let's increase the size. Let's try 100 first. I'd say we can bring this up a little bit more. Maybe even double that. So I'd say to about 200. Great. So again, you can animate on this locator if you'd like, but ideally, this is just a way to keep track of the orientation here of the object we've just constrained. So we may go in and hide this afterwards. It all depends on what you'd like to use it for. But either way, our hips are now constrained and, for the most part, ready for animation. We do have the wheels to rig in the back, which we will get to work on in the next lesson.