Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

In this lesson, we'll create custom parameters that will be used to control the character's eyelids. Firstly, what I'd like to do is store the eyes in a temporary layer. It will be easier to work with them that way. Let's go into our layer manager. We'll unfreeze the character. Get over to our select tool and with the eye selected, we'll go ahead and create a new layer. We'll still keep the default layer active. And then, with them still selected I'll turn of x-ray. OK. So the next step is going to be to disconnect the eyes from the slider. Now, this slider is what Justin has built to control the blinking. But we're going to go ahead and take a different approach. That'll be a little bit more animator friendly. So to disconnect the eyelids, what we can do is first start with this right eyelid. With that selected, we'll press ALT5 to get to its wiring dialogue. Now, what's nice is that max indicates what's already connected by highlighting the object in red. So I'm just going to go ahead and open this up, get to its object, open that up, and notice it's sliced to and sliced from. That's what's used to control the blinking. They're connected. So we're going to need to break that connection. I'll go ahead and select the slider and refresh that on the left side. Get to it's object value. Now, with this right eyelid, I've actually already disconnected it in some way from this slider. But you can see it still has connections there. So if you run into something like this, I'll show you how to just remove this connection. All you need to do is simply reconnect this value right into that parameter that you'd like to disconnect. And then, simply choose disconnect after it's been connected. Notice it's no longer red. So we'll do the same to the parameter underneath the slice to. Again, we connect value into slice to and then choose disconnect. So do the same with the left eyelid. Refresh that object slice to and slice from. And these are actually connected so we'll just choose disconnect here. OK, now they're going to close, but I have values here we can use to open them back up. We'll just head over to our modify panel. And under the parameters roll out, the slice from, we're going to want that set to negative 14. And the slice to we can set to 30 to kind of round that out. Now, let's do the same with the right eye. Again, it's negative 14 slice from, slice to is 30. Now, with these values already in our slice to and slice from pose an interesting challenge. We basically need to keep these values the same but plug them into custom parameters that have their values set to zero so that we keep this state. So we're going to be discussing that in the next lesson. But firstly, let's go ahead and select this slider and just delete that. We don't need that anymore. And now, we can go ahead and work on creating the custom parameters. So selecting the head control, we'll press ALT1. And actually before that, of course, we can create an attribute holder. So let's go ahead and do that. So we don't have any of these other properties to worry about. OK, great. So with the attribute holder there, again, head over to our parameter editor and we'll start with a category. So we'll set that to string. For the name, it's going to be blinks, and for the description we'll type in blink parameters. OK, once that's done, we'll go ahead and choose add it. All right now, we can create the custom parameters that we use to animate with. So we'll switch this parameter type back to flow, and we're going to be creating four. Two for the left, two for the right, one for the upper lid, one for the lower lid. So starting with the first one, that's going to be left upper lid. The width, again, we can set that to 100. And then, for our min and max we could actually use values of negative 100 and positive 100. So we have a lot of room to work with. And then, I'll go ahead and just choose add and create three more. So the next one is going to be left lower lid. Choose add. And the next will be right upper lid, choose add, and we'll create one for the lower lid. OK, great. What I'd like to actually do from here before we close this off is just to select each eye object and link that right to the head bone, just to take care of that. Oops. I've actually linked it so the character. If you do find yourself doing that, just go ahead and freeze your character and then, relink that right back to the head bone. OK, great. So that's going to finish this lesson. In the next lesson we will rig the eyelids to blink.