Advanced character rigging
Advanced Character Rigging with Maya 7.0
by ascottk
Introduction
Skip to Advanced Character Rigging - Part Two
Skip to 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)
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.)
Need to know tools in Maya:
Outliner
Attribute Editor
Paint Skin Weight Tool referred to occasionally as weight painter . . .
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
