Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

In this lesson we'll constrain our foot bones to the helpers we created for them. What I'd like to do here at this step is to go in and freeze transforms on our helpers to clean them up. If we were to go ahead and select one of these and head over to our motion panel, you can see that by looking at its values, lets say its rotation z-axis, you can see that it has values here matching to the orientation of our ankle in this case. Now the problem with that is when we go in and create controls to influence these, it's going to be problematic to set those up because these objects are not clean. They're not zeroed out. So by freezing transforms we zero out our position and rotation lists so that when it comes time to set up our controls, it's far easier on us. It's much more of a seamless process. So what we'll go ahead and do is select each root helper. And with those both selected, we'll press Ctrl+PageDown to grab the entire hierarchy, and then from there it's just a matter of Alt+right clicking and choosing freeze transform. We choose yes, and now that they're cleaned up, if we were to go back to that same helper, go to our rotation list, notice we can see that a new list has been made, zero oiler letting us know it has been zeroed out. Same thing for position. OK, but going back to that in rotation, if we were to check out the z-axis now, notice it's set to zero. Great, so now that this is clean, then it's going to be far easier for us when setting this up. Also notice this. When we freeze a control, if we were to go ahead and let's say rotate this, if we wanted to bring it back to its original position, its skin pose or pose frame, we can say, we go ahead and Alt+Right click and choose transform to zero, and it pops right back to it zero spot. All right, great. So let's go ahead and work on our constraints. Firstly what we want to do is go ahead and position constrain IK goals to their helpers. So it's just a matter of selecting the IK goal, right clicking and choosing position constrain, and then we're going to tie that right to the ankle helper. So now as that ankle helper moves, it's going to move the leg. Now what we need to do is control the rotation of our ankle and ball. So in this case it's a matter of taking this ball helper and making sure that it controls the orientation of the ankle. So choosing the ankle first, we'll alt+right click, choose orientation constrain, and plug that right into the ball helper. So as we select that ball helper and start to rotate that, notice here is that rotation we're looking for our foot roll. All right, let's go ahead and finish this up by simply taking the ball bone and orientation constraining that to the toe. Now watch what we get. When we go ahead and rotate this ball helper, it's going to be locked. So there's our foot roll. And now when we go ahead and start to rotate the toe, notice there is our toe roll. Great. And rather than automating our foot roll, we're going to give the animator the ability to control each of these as much as they want. And also notice this. If we were to now select that heel and start to rotate that around, we get a good idea of our heel roll. OK, great. So it's the same process for the left side. Again, we select our IK goal and make sure that it's going to have a position constraint tied to the ankle helper. We select our ankle bone, orientation constrain that to the ball helper, and the ball bone gets orientation constrained to the toe helper. And then from there we always want to test these things out to make sure that they're functioning right. All right, excellent. Great. And then as we select this heel, start to rotate that around, all right, it's moving just fine. But we could also move this and and an idea of how our foot control is going to behave. We don't want any orientation on our foot, so this is great. Notice how it's staying flat. We want to control its rotation. And this is great for foot plants. All right, so I'm going to go ahead and Alt+right click, transform to zero to bring that back, and once that's done, we can go ahead and take these objects, add them to their layers, and call this lesson finished. And by the next lesson, we're ready to build our actual foot controls. So I'll select the heel helpers. Again, Ctrl+Pagedown, and store them under objects to hide. So if we were to hide that, notice how clean everything looks in the end. Great, so that's going to finish off this lesson. In the next lesson we'll get right into building our foot controls.