Introduction to Character Rigging in 3ds Max

In this lesson, we'll draw the finger bones for the left hand. I'd say the top view would be the best for you to draw the fingers in. We can very easily see their placement, that way, where the bone should be placed. So let's head over to the top view and get back to our bone tools and start. And we can start with the index finger. And again, we want to keep in mind ontopology. So I'll actually draw out the index chain first creating the pivot right at the center edge loop of each section of the finger. OK, right where the finger would deform from. We'll do the same for the pinkie. And again, it takes a good study of anatomy to determine exactly where these bones should be placed and also what would be the best method for creating our finger bones. In a later course, we actually cover a good way to keep the volume in the fingers. The set up is a little bit more elaborate than what we're going with, but the results we'll get with this are still going to be a very nice. So I'll go ahead and draw out the thumb chain. That can be kind of tricky but again, just study your own hand. So we'll go ahead and start with the root, draw the next bone and finish off right at the end. OK, so here are our finger bones. Let's say we head over to the perspective and work on bringing these up. I'll come out of the bone tools. We'll select each root, and we'll use ALTA to align this only in the z-axis. So we're snapping right to our nub. So we want to make sure that the y and z are turned off. We also want to make sure that we don't have any orientation turned on as well, just the z-axis. And by doing this our fingers should be positioned right where they need to be, at least the pinkie and the index, right there centered between our geometry. As far as the thumb goes, we're going to need to do a little bit of work here. So selecting the thumb's root, making sure our rotation tool is set to local, we'll go ahead and rotate this down in the y-axis and kind of rotate it up and in the x, fix it's position. I'd also like to go to move tool and kind of bring this up a little bit more and rotate it down just so it's centered a little bit better. OK, from here we'll go to the next bone. And we're going to rotate this so that the z-axis is following the orientation of our thumb geometry. With it set like this, as we rotate in the z, we're going to get the wrong bending. What we should actually get is this type of bending here, what we're getting from the x-axis. All right, so we'll go ahead and select the next bone and just rotate that in the y-axis about 90 degrees so that it matches with our geometry. OK, great. So now that that's done, we can take our root bones and go ahead and link them to the wrist. Now, it's just a matter of renaming these, recoloring them, and then the next lesson, we're going to be mirroring over this chain. So let's go ahead and work on renaming and recoloring these bones, making sure they're going to be stored in their layer and then we'll close off the lesson. So starting with the thumb, it's going to b n underscore l, underscore thumb, underscore a zero one, since it's the root. Copy that and go to the next bone, paste. It's going to b and then c. OK, by the time we get to the nub we'll simply label this b, thumb end. That brings us to the index. Let's go ahead and rename that. And that's index a, copy the name, go to the next bone, and that'll be b. And then c, and for the nub, that'll be index n. So be, index n zero one. All right, so we just have the pinkie to work on. Just copy the name, go to the next bone, paste and that's going to be b and then c and the nub will be pinkie end. OK, great. Let's say we go ahead and select each root, head over back to our bone tools. Actually, we have it minimized. I'll go ahead and refresh that. And then, choose that same color of blue. OK. So the darker blue and then for end color we use a lighter blue. Apply gradient. We do want to apply this to the entire chain so let's make sure we press control page down and do this once again. OK, there we go. All right, so our fingers are now colored. Selecting each root again, let's just make sure that they're going to be stored in envelope object. So again, control page down, head over to the layer manager, and store them underneath envelope objects. All right, great. So that's going to finish off our finger chain. In the next lesson we'll go ahead and mirror over our left arm.