Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

Let's begin building our control rig. What I'd like to do from here is x-ray the character. Let's go ahead and select the entire mesh. And we'll choose x-ray on. From there we can head over to our layer manager, alt right clicking, choosing layer manager, or manage layers. And then we'll freeze the character. This will make sure that we don't accidentally select it as we begin building our bones and controls. What's also a good habit is to press F4 so we can view the character's wire frame. So we can make sure that we're placing our bones in the right location for proper deformations. If we're not mindful of the character's topology our deformations are not going to look right. And that's what we don't want. Now we can head over to our side view and we're going to start by building the leg chain. So what I'll go ahead and do, press F4 again so we can see the wire frame. And now we can alt right click to access our bone tools. OK, great. So from here it's just a matter of choosing Create Bones. And under the modify panel we have settings we could choose to initially set the size of our bones or even turn on fins. We're actually going to work with fins a little bit later. But let's go ahead and, for right now, increase the width and height to 1. So these bones are going to be a little bit larger. And now it's just a matter of going in and drawing out our chain. So starting with a hip place that right where it should deform from, our thigh bone. And the next will be the knee. Now notice I'm drawing this at an angle, which is very important. If we draw out with an angle for the knee, making sure that it is following the contour of our character's leg, then that will make sure that our leg will bend right when we apply our IK handle. This is called the preferred angle. When we add this angle to our chain we're basically telling Max what direction we'd like to bend this limb in. So make sure you do that what your characters. If it's just straight, of course Max won't know which way to bend your leg chain. So I'm going to draw right at the knee. And then finally, we can finish up with the foot. So it's drawing to the ankle. Then the ball of the foot, and then finally the toe. And this nub here we'll just right click to end the chain. And I'll right quick once again to exit Create Bones mode. OK, so from here can go ahead and take a look at our chain from the side view. Make sure everything's in the right location. OK so for example, here with the ankle, maybe I want this pivot to be down a little bit more. What you can do is access your bone tools and choose bone edit mode. Choose the bone, go to your move tool and just start to move this. And notice it's just going to move that bone. It's not going to interfere with the children at all, the bones underneath this, in hierarchy. Everything else looks good. So I'm going to go ahead and turn off bone edit mode, which is very important that we do once we're done with that process. OK, once that's done, we can head over to our front view, and make sure that this bone is going to lie in the right spot. So I'll go ahead and turn back on wire frame. I choose the root. And just slide that over so it's centered in the character's leg. OK, great. From here let's head over to our perspective. And now it's a matter of renaming these. So I like to use a naming convention that's going to work great for adding our envelope objects to influence our mesh. So for all of the bones that we want to envelope to we can use a prefix of BN. And later on we'll be able to use a wild card to quickly access all of those bones and add them to our character's envelope. So for this first one we can simply call this BN, underscore, followed by the direction it lies in-- it's the left side-- so it's going to be L, followed by what this bone is associated with, and that would be the thigh. And then I'll put a 01. And this is basically what represents how unique this object is in the scene. If we were to ever use this name again there would be a conflict. And instead of 01 that object would be labeled 02. Right so I'll hit enter. We can go ahead and copy this. Go to the next bone, paste, this is going to be our shin. The next one will be our ankle. And then the ball, [INAUDIBLE] name the ball of the foot. And finally for this end nub, knowing that we do not want this to be a part of our envelope-- and the reason why is that would be unnecessary work to have to paint weights to this area-- so knowing that, we can give this a prefix of BE for bone end. And then for the name we'll simply called this Toe End 01. Now that that's done what I like to do is re-color this and mirror it across. So we'll select everything and head over back to our bone tools. I love the tools that Max offers us. It's great to have the ability to color our chain very easily. And this helps to differentiate between our envelope bones. So, for example here, what we could do is head over to bone coloring and choose a start color of, let's say, blue for the left side. And for the right we'll use green. So I'll kind of darken the start color up, a darker blue. And for the end color, can use a lighter shade of blue. From there, we choose apply gradient and our chain is re-colored. All right great. Let's say we work on mirroring this over now. We'll select our entire chain and choose mirror. OK, we want to mirror over on the x-axis. We can see that by looking at our manipulator. And also looking at our axis in the scene. So that's already set. What we need to now do is move the offset to reposition this. So initially we can go with five. I'll go ahead and choose OK. And then we may need to go in, select the root. And reposition this a little bit better. So I'll kind of slide it over a little bit more so it's centered. OK. So that looks better. All right, now that that's done of course we want to go ahead and rename this. Now what's nice is that Max adds a suffix of mirrored, letting us know that this is a mirrored chain. What we're going to go ahead and do, though, is remove that and we'll rename these within an underscore, R underscore, for right side. And simply get rid of mirrored. So let's do that for the other bones. Get rid of the R or get rid of the L, replace that with R and get rid of mirrored. And we're just about done here. We're just going to do a few more things. We're going to go ahead and recolor this chain. And then afterwards we'll actually add a history independent solver to both chains to get those moving right. OK great. So now that that's done just a matter of, again selecting our chain, heading back over to our bone tools and choosing a color of green. So, again, I'll darken the green for the start color. And lighten it up for the end. And there we have it. OK, so let's go ahead and finish up by adding that history independent solver. We simply select our root bone, which is the thigh, and connect that to the ankle. So with that selected, again, we alt right click and choose HI IK solver. Connect that right to the ankle. So now with this IK goal selected as we move this around we have an idea of how our leg is going to bend when our control rig is finished. Also notice that, because we've set that preferred angle, it's going to bend right. If this chain was straight it might bend in the other direction. Which my look interesting, who knows. All right. Let's say we go ahead and rename this IK goal. So that's going to be HI IK for history independent IK, underscore, L, underscore, leg 01. I'll just go ahead and copy that name. We'll select the next root. Go ahead and apply that history independent solver. And rename this to HI IK R leg 01. All right Let's say we go ahead and store these in layers. So we'll go to manage layers. We'll select the IK goals, add those to objects to hide, and then we could select both roots. And a trick to grab the entire hierarchy is to hold down control and press page down. Notice that we'll grab all of the bones underneath, all of the child bones. So now we can go to envelope objects and choose add. OK, great. So from here I'll stop the lesson. In the next lesson we'll add some fins to add some volume to what we see here.