Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

In this lesson we will constrain the robot's spine geometry. We've already constrained one piece, so it's just a matter of grabbing the last two. We can start with the hip. And we use our Object Offset tool for this. But I'm going to go ahead and grab just a few of these pieces here. You can see which object we'll need to constrain down. So grabbing the hip pieces, we'll set a key-- Shift-W. And now we can go ahead and move them out. And it's this piece right here. We want to make sure we don't grab the horizontal piece, but the vertical piece, since that is the parent. So So let's go ahead and take care of that. We grab our hip joint, grab the mesh to constrain and use our Object Offset tool. Let's say we start to increase the size on this. We can start with about 100 and move on from there till we find a good size for this-- let's say about a value of 130 to round that out. I think that's going to work out very well. All right, so that's been locked down. We can test this out and rotate the piece. Great. Let's now go ahead and move our timeline to snap those pieces back. Select them both and break connections. The next piece is actually connected to the neck, so we can go ahead and grab the robot's head group. We can just move that over to the side. It's this rod right here, connected right into the robot's head mesh. The control we're going to use for this is actually going to be our neck control, and we'll use it to have the head transform into the body. So this is a really cool stuff. And I'm also going to introduce you to another tool you can work with. It's just like the object offset tool, only this time it generates a locator. Again, we're just changing the shape of these control objects so that they're easier to access. I'll go ahead and load up the script editor for you. OK, I just went in and cleared everything out. Let's head over to File, Load Script, and we are going to grab the locator offset control tool. Let's grab that. And again, it's the same thing as the object offset control, so no need to go through any of this. We should have an idea of how the script runs. And then we have comments here in case we need any help on what each section does. I'll go ahead and highlight all of this, add that to the shelf, and I'll close this out. We'll Right-Click, choose Edit, head over to Shelves. Let's go ahead and rename this by clearing out some of this stuff here in the front, and also in the back. So we're left with the name of the tool locator offset control. I'll go ahead and copy that and use it as the tool tip. And our instructions are as follows. We first select our target, then the source. The name of this will be L-O-T. So go ahead and choose Save All Shelves. Now let's work on the locking this down. I'll grab the chest joint. Grab the mesh to constrain. Use our Locator Offset tool. If I were to go to wire frame mode you could see that the locator is right there, of course, where the chest joint is. We're going to want to bring up its eyes. Let's start with about a value of 100. And then we will also move its shape up around the neck so it's easier to select this. We'd have a hard time grabbing this from inside the body. And the animator would not appreciate that. So let's say we go ahead and start to move this up. We'll go to our x-axis first. Since the object has been reoriented to joint, the x-axis is actually of course moving up the spine. So we'll just continue to bring this up to about 190 or so in the x. And then we can start to bring this forward. And I will now go to Shaded Mode to take a look at this. I might bring it back just a little bit more. And we could always go with about a value of negative 90, somewhere around there. I might want to drop it down a bit more around the neck. So I'll use about a value of 175. OK, that should work out just fine. So grabbing our head group, let's go ahead and move this back by just zeroing everything out. And now, to test this we can grab our locator and start to have that transform. Great. So it's now moving that neck piece. And our head rig, we'll make sure we connect to that same locator object so everything will transform as needed. So our mesh is inside of the robot, our spine meshes have been constrained. So we're ready to work on a center of gravity control which we will take care of in the next lesson.