Technical Notes Week #10 - Maya Rigging + Soft Selection Notes

 

Technical Notes Week #10

Soft selection and sculpting are modelling options/tools which allow for interpolated movement of groups of vertices, rather than simply moving a single vertex at a time. Soft select essentially applies a falloff, gradually decreasing the influence of the transformation outward from the selection, creating organic shaping rather than jagged/sharp deformation. Sculpting works similar to this, but you don't work with the vertices/topology as directly - it's slightly more abstracted.

This can greatly improve efficiency for organic models and allow a much more clay-like and intuitive approach to modelling. Good example use cases include terrain, bodies and clothing.

The object should be appropriate in size (not too small), because the falloff radius or brush size is calculated based on scene units. Therefore the effect area of the soft select will likely be too great in magnitude relatively (as a baseline) so you will lose any fine control. 

Rigging Technical Notes (from workshop):

• First (easiest) option for posing is to soft select an area/limb, use ‘d’ to adjust the pivot point, and then rotate (on a copy of your character model)

• Rigging window is where you do the character rig work (big surprise) you want to use the skeleton window to create joints. Starting in side view is good

• Xray joints button so that you can view your bones in front

• Root bone for character should be around pelvis/belly button area (this is based on real life - spinal movements originate from here

• About 5 joints along the spine is typical - follow the curvature of the spine

• A single joint through the head works (potentially a jaw joint could also be helpful)

• Can use ‘d’ to move a joint without affecting the whole bone hierarchy 

• When you create the initial leg bones they will be centred and you will need to move them within the correct leg to mirror at some point

• Very useful to have clothing separate from body mesh at this stage so you can hide them and place the bones more accurately 

• Need a clavicle joint between the spine and shoulder (important for moving the arm)

• Try to line up joints with places where mesh is designed to receive them (locations like the elbows or ankles should contain a bunch of extra edge loops to aid with deformation)

• Fingers should have about 3 bones from the knuckle down. Can duplicate this for other fingers (except the thumb should only need 2 bones). Arm should just need two bones (upper arm + forearm) 

• End joints are not useful for anything much other than visually seeing where bones end

• Make sure bones are lined up on all 3 axis - harder with things like the fingers where they occlude each other in orthographic (generally faster to do in perspective view)

• Shift select two or more bones and click ‘P’ and it will parents (and add filler bone/s) edge with the fingers it will join every finger bone to the hand joint with an additional bone)

•  Shift select whole armature and whole mesh, then use the ‘skin’ tool/window and bind skin’. Then do this one by one with each pair of clothing. It will be doing some kind of automatic weight painting behind the scenes, as it makes things deform. If your meshes are clean it should work for general purpose, but may need touch-ups (either fix weight painting, or directly edit the posed mesh - don’t push poses too far for this assessment)

• There are a bunch of skin weight tools in the skin window - the ‘paint skin weights’ option can be intimidating and time consuming, but can use the tool in a simple way to make parts of the mesh only influenced by a single bone to avoid unwanted deformation

• Don’t forget to attach the eyeballs and extra components to the head

• Can use arrow keys to navigate bone hierarchy 

• Can turn off/hide joints to stop yourself from accidentally selecting them

• Can detach mesh from armature afterwards - can duplicate everything except the bones and move it off to the side

• ‘Quick rig’ and ‘human IK’ are additional options within Maya

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• Can import provided turntable file into Maya - there are several provided podium base meshes. Make sure your meshes are in the right folder. Animation is already done - so you can press the play button and watch your scene. A test render is also a good idea before rendering the sequence (which can go on a showreel).

• A whole bunch of simple colours have been provided as materials to use on different parts (definitely adjust the colours to match your theme)