Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

In this lesson, we'll create our eye controls. For the eyes, what I like to do is actually create controls for each separate eye, and then we can create a parent control that will be used to control the eyes at the same time. So to get this started, let's head over to our front view. From there, we'll create a circle. So this is what's going to be used for our separate eye controls. We could also turn off rendering. So let's head over to the Modify panel and uncheck that. So once we find a size that we like for this control, once we've scaled it down to a good size, we can go ahead and quick snap this to the left eye. We'll press Control V and go ahead and quick snap that copy over to the right eye. Now it's hard to see them, so let's head over to our Layer Manager and hide layer one. From there, we can select both of these shapes and bring them out. Then, go ahead and unhide layer one. So I'd like to maybe scale these down just a little bit more. We could do that by heading over to our Scale tool and switching our coordinate system to Local so that they scale, of course, around their pivot. Great. From here, we can go ahead and work on renaming and recoloring these. The one on the left side, that's going to be cc_L_eye01. That's going to have a color of blue. On the right, that's cc_R_eye01, and we can use the color of green. So now that they're made, they're recolored, we can go ahead and work on setting up a parent control. Let's head over back to the create panel. We could actually use an ngon for this. Just draw that out on the grid. And we'll do a few things to this. We'll go ahead and turn on rendering. What we could also do is make it a four-sided ngon so it's got this diamond shape. Now how are we going to center it between both of these controls? Well, we could actually use a position constraint. With it selected, we'll Alt-Right-Click, choose Position Constraint. Constrain that to the left control. Go back to our position constraint and constrain it to the right. And now you can see that this object is centered. Its weight is at the 50/50. Now from here, to remove the position constraint, to clean this up and keep this object at the same position, we don't just want to go to this position constraint and delete it. Notice it's going to pop right back. So instead, we'll just Alt-Right-Click and choose Freeze Transforms, and now it's all cleaned up. From here, we can head over to our Hierarchy panel, go to Object Only, and with angle snap, we'll go ahead and just rotate that 90 degrees. From here, we can go ahead and scale this down, maybe scale it down in the Z, just so it wraps around our controls a little bit better. And if you wanted to, you could always go to the Modify panel and increase its thickness a little bit more, maybe to about 0.5. As far as its color, we'll go ahead and use that dull yellow we've been using. Now we can go ahead and call this cc_eyes01. Now we don't want it linked to the head control because the eyes-- the way they work is they target on certain objects that come within its point of view. So if we were to link this control to our head control, we wouldn't get that targeting effect. We'd have to do a lot of counter keying and the eyes would look unnatural. So instead, we're actually going to leave this parented to the world, we can say. We will have it linked to our global control when we create that. So I'm just going to do a little bit of clean up work on this. We can go ahead and make sure its transformations are frozen, just clean it up. We do the same for the separate eye controls. We want those linked to the main control. And now with them both selected, let's go ahead and choose Transform to Zero. You can see that they're going to pop out of position. So that's why we want to link first and then freeze. So if we were to undo that back, they're already linked, so let's go ahead and just choose Freeze Transforms. And now, if we were to go ahead and run Transform to Zero, it's just fine. So our last task here before we get into finishing our eye rig is just going to be storing these in their layer. And then we can go ahead and close out the lesson. And then by the next lesson, we will finish our eye rig. So I'll select this Parent Control, press Control Page Down. I'm going to go ahead and choose the Control Objects Layer. All right. So that's going to finish off this lesson. In the next lesson, we will finish our eye rig.