Advanced character rigging

Introduction

Skip to Advanced Character Rigging - Part Two or Advanced Character Rigging - Part Three

For a brief overview of getting animated characters into Doom 3, go here: Getting_Characters_and_their_Anims_into_Doom (you'll find the Maya 7 plugin here)

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Maya is a beast of a modeling program & it has a big learning curve. When you get used it, you'll find that the work flow can be pretty quick. Turning your Maya mesh into an animated Doom 3 model will require a lot of patience & a lot of work because of the fine tuning the weights of an animated rig. Unforeseen consequences, . . . ahem . . . like submeshes clipping through another submesh and unintentional rigging of joints you don't want, can be frustrating but those are the reasons for this tutorial!

First of all, here's a list of useful hotkeys:

• Alt + Left Mouse Button - Rotate the view port ("Tumble")

• Alt + Middle Mouse Button - Pan in the view port ("Track")

• Alt + Right Mouse Button - Zoom in the view port ("Dolly")

• F1 - Maya help (opens in a web broswer)

• F2 - Animation specific menus

• F3 - Modeling specific menus

• F4 - Dynamics specific menus (not very useful for Doom 3)

• F5 - Rendering specific menus (rendering current frames, texturing/lighting, etc.)

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Need to know tools in Maya:

Outliner

Attribute Editor

Paint Skin Weight Tool

This tool is the one you'll want to familiarize yourself with, especially the Replace, Add and Smooth functions in the "Paint Weights" rollout.

Of course we'll need a mesh to rig.

Enter Diego's Thug character:

& now we'll need a skeleton to rig the mesh to:

Now that we have all we need to start, let's go on to Part Two: Advanced Character Rigging - Part Two