Transforming Robot Production Pipeline Volume 6: Rigging

Let's begin rigging the fingers. So, we'll start with the left hand and make sure we mirror those joints across. Let's get started with the thumb. We'll grab our Edge Loop right at the center and use CJNT. Make it an Error that says No Object Matches the name of the mesh we're using this tool on. No worries, it will still work just fine. Let's go ahead and move to the next section. We're going to create two more joints; one to bend the egg and segment, and then one for the very end of the thumb to finish the chain. I'll switch to Edge Mode. Go to Wire Frame, grab the Edge Loop, go ahead and run CJNT. And we'll do this one more time. This time let's grab a few vertices at the very tip. Great. All right, at this point we'll grab each joint and view their LRAs. And now we can use our Reorient Joint Tool. It's just a matter of grabbing the joint in the center, grabbing our thumb's root. You'll see that the twist axis is a little bit off. No worries, we can just go to our Attribute Editor and adjust this so that the y is pointed up and away given the thumb's angle. We're just about there. That looks pretty good. We can around that out to 105. Great. For this next joint, what we could always do is parent it to the thumb root and then go ahead and run RJT to reset it's orientation to have it match it's parent. And then at that point, in the z-axis, we can have that point down towards the end joint. And then for the end joint, again, it's the same process. We parent it to the joint in the center. And we can go ahead and run our Reset Joint Tool to fix that. OK, great. We're not going to parent these just yet. We'll make sure we mirror across first. Let's go ahead and rename these. Select the root, the mid-joint, and the end, and use our Rename Tool. So, that is jnt_l_thumb. And we'll name these alphabetically. This is A, copy the name. The Next will, of course, be B. And the last one, since it's an end joint, will be jntend thumb_c. Let's say we go ahead and work on the index. And, by the way, the index and the mid fingers, and pretty much the rest of the fingers, are going to be done the same exact way. The only difference is the pinkie, you can see it's at an angle. But we know how to conquer that challenge already, because we've already addressed that with the thumb. But moving on to the index, go ahead and do our Edge Loop selection. Go ahead and run our Create Joint Tool. We'll go to the next segment, and in Edge Mode, go ahead and grab our Edge Loop and run our Joint Tool. Great, we need to create two more. There's the Edge Loop, and there's the joint. And then, again, at the very tip, we only need to grab a few vertices. All right. The next step would be to reorient these. Let's go ahead and view their LRAs. And we'll ahead and grab or Reorient Joint Tool, go ahead and get these taken care of. Grab this end joint, grab its parent, reorient, and now we can parent the very end joint to the bone that will drive it. Grab the end joint and reset it. Let's get the others reparented. And then at that point, selecting all four of these, we have an idea of the naming structure already. That's going to be jnt_l_index_a01. And then b, c, and then by the time we get to d, that's going to be jntend d01. So, I'm going to go ahead and skip over that step. And in the scene file that follows, I'll have all of this taken care of. But after we're done creating our joints, we can go ahead and mirror them across. That's going to be the next step after, of course, they have been renamed. Let's go ahead and take care of the others. We have this object right in the center that we can use. Let's go and grab its Edge Loop. It's right inside of the knuckle mesh. Then we'll go through and we're essentially describing the same edges. I'll go ahead and pause the video and take care of the middle finger. We'll also create a joints for the pinkie. And then I'll work with you to reorient the joints just so you have the steps down. The middle finger is finished. Now, for the pinkie, I've already created the joints. We'll start by using our Orient Joint Tool. And then we'll go in and adjust the x-axis so that y is following the angle of the pinkie. At that point, we can go ahead and parent the next joint to the root. And we can go ahead and run our Reset Joint Tool to correct its rotation. We can then go ahead and parent the following joint. Again, reset. We can adjust the z-axis to have it point at the end. And then we can go ahead and parent the end joint and reset it. So, not much work at all there. So once we make sure that each have been renamed, we can then go ahead and mirror these across. So, for instance, with the thumb, it's just a matter of using our Mirror Tool. You want to make sure, of course, they're renamed that way you won't have to rename the right side. That's going to be the last step for this lesson. In the next lesson, we will go ahead and parent each of these. And then go ahead and constrain our finger mesh groups.