Wrapping Up the Setup
Former Student Spotlight: Rob Miller
Cleaning up the scene file for animation
Old Man by Colin Senner (2006).
Former Student Spotlight: Rob Miller
Those interested in one day aspiring to join the ranks in the CG industry have the perfect opportunity to break into it by creating a “customized business card”. No, I’m not talking about the small piece of thick paper used to pick teeth … a short film! From experience, creating a short film opened so many doors for me and acted as a personalized business card. It showed employers what I was capable of producing and that I was able to follow through to the end with my own personal objectives and goals.
If you end up catching the short film bug as I’ve done, be sure you keep these very simple pointers in mind. First and foremost, PLAN! In school I created a short called “The Pick Up” that was originally supposed to be 30 seconds long. Needless to say I started animating with a rough storyline idea in my head, and what I thought would have been 30 seconds ended up being almost four minutes long. The problem was there were no storyboards, no animatics, and no thumbnails. I was so excited and more concerned with getting started on the animation that I suppose I hoped it would all work out in the end. Needless to say, it caused a lot of pain later on down the road. A former teacher once told me “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail,” and these words are so true. I cannot emphasize enough how important planning is. You owe it to yourself and you’ll have a much happier experience.
After planning out your next project, take a look at what you have. It’s easy to get excited about your next endeavors, thus wanting to make an epic, but if you are first starting out, keep it short and simple. The only thing I did right in creating “The Pick Up” was the simplicity of the characters and the 3D set. I intentionally thought to myself that I wanted to sell my skill set as an animator and storyteller, so I made simple characters, created a simple set, and then applied a simple story. Don’t strive for anything epic or expect to create a masterpiece on your first go round. Remember you have to start your learning curve from the beginning, so start with simplicity first. It’s far better to have a very strong 30 seconds short film then a 10 minutes mediocre epic with 200 plus shots.
Finally, the biggest lesson I learned that helped considerably in getting to where I am today came from surrounding myself with people and teachers who would give brutal critiques. If it’s available, find those with better abilities than you and ask for critiques on your work. Don’t be shy and don’t wait until you are finished with your project. The more you lend your ear to a great critique, the faster you will get better and better. The friends you surround yourself with will become invaluable to you as you continue through your education and break into the industry. Thankfully the Internet is a wonderful resource with its wide array of forums should you not attend a formal school.
So to wrap up: plan, keep it simple, and lend an ear for critiques as you progress. Hope to see you working alongside me one day. Best of luck!
Rob T. Miller graduated from the Savannah College of Art and Design and was awarded with the Outstanding Academic Achievement Award in Animation, the highest honor from an academic department. His short film “The Pick Up” was screened in many film festivals around the world most notably at FMX in Stuttgart Germany in Peter Plantec and Shelly Paige’s panel presentation of “Understanding Exceptional Short Animation”. His professional works have included high-end television commercials and various video game cinematics across multiple titles. Currently he resides in Los Angeles, California as a cinematic animator in the video game industry. His work can be seen at: www.robtmiller.com
The Pickup by Rob T. Miller (2004).
Wrap-up workflow.
Before this control rig can be considered complete, there must be some time spent in cleaning up the scene file. Making sure that everything is labeled properly is an ideal place to start, but it is also important to group or organize all of the elements into one node, so that bringing the character into an environment ready for animation is a neat and tidy process. It is rather frustrating for a production team to have a messy scene file.
Cleaning up the scene file for animation
There are times that you will need to resize, move or rotate your character into place before you begin animating. Creating a master control can make this simple, as well as organize your objects in the scene file.
Now that you are finishing up the character rig, go back over the controls and make sure they are optimized for animation. Hide any channels that the animator should not keyframe. In most cases, this includes the scale and visibility channels. For some, it will include the rotations or translations. It is also a good idea to lock those channels also, so that the animator cannot alter the locked and hidden channels. Any channel that has color should be hidden so that they are not keyframed (colored channels are controlled by constraints, set driven keys, expressions, etc.).
The process of hiding a channel is quite simple. Simply go to the channel box, click on the attribute name that you would wish to hide, hold down the right mouse button on top of those words, and choose either lock and hide selected or hide selected. If a mistake is made while hiding attributes, it is a bit more difficult to bring them back to the channel box. To make an attribute visible again, you must go to [Window > General Editors > Channel Control] and do the following:
• Click on the KEYABLE tab.
• Select the attributes in the middle column that you want to place into the keyable list and click on the MOVE button on the bottom right. This moves them into the Keyable list and they should also appear in the channel box.
The Channel Control window.
• Now click on the LOCKED tab.
• Select the attributes on the left column that you want to move to the non-locked list and click the MOVE button on the bottom left. This moves them to the NON-LOCKED list.
• Repeat this for every controller.
IK handles and IK spline curves should also be hidden so that the animator doesn’t accidentally keyframe them during the animation process. This is also an easy process. Simply select the IK handles and press (ctrl+h) on the keyboard to hide them.
Preparing the scene file for skinning
The last part of the actual character setup is adding the skin deformer so that when the joints move and rotate, the geometry moves and deforms with it. Since there are multiple joint chains for the spine and the arms, it is unnecessary to add all of the joints to the skin deformer. In fact, this would actually create more problems because the multiple joints would share the deformation and stretch the geometry between them, causing undesirable results. To avoid this and expedite the skinning process, which is covered in Chapter 8, we will create a set that contains only the joints needed to deform the geometry.
Wombat by Brett Rapp (2006).
It is also helpful to add some control to speed up the process of animating. There are several techniques that help the keyframing process. The two most common are the use of character sets and MEL buttons to select controllers. While characters sets seem to be a popular tool, I personally do not like the way they work. The character set is simply a defined set of attributes so that when the keyframe is placed on one controller, all of the other attributes that are part of the set are also keyframed. To create a character set, you simply select all of the controllers and go to the menu item [Character > Create Character Set].
While this approach sounds wonderful, I have found that it does cause major confusion with beginning animators. Because Maya is setting keyframes on many attributes, the amount of keyframed data can easily become overwhelming. So my advice to a beginning animator is to make sure you are completely aware of all keyframes being set and not let the computer do the work for you.
This brings me to my preferred method: creating MEL Script buttons on a shelf that allows for ease in the selection of all of the controllers or a specified area of controllers. A button that allows you to select all of the controllers gives you the ability to key the entire character on your key poses. Additional buttons that specify all of the controls in an arm, the leg, or the spine provide the animator a method of keying specific areas quickly.
7.1 After all the controls have been created, it is important to take time and organize a scene file so that it can be used efficiently during production.
7.2 Make sure that everything is labeled properly in the scene file.
7.3 Create a master control that provides the ability to move, rotate, and scale the character prior to animation.
7.4 Go through every control and optimize them for animation by hiding and locking (if necessary) any attributes that will not be animated.
7.5 You can also go through the scene file and hide any objects that are not necessary, such as IK handles, so that they are not keyframed accidentally during the animation process.
7.6 Creating selection buttons for the controllers is one way to speed up the animation workflow and can be easily done and customized. This provides the animator a quick way of selecting groups of controllers that need to be keyframed.
7.7 Character sets can be used for the same purpose, but can cause more work with the amount of keyframe data that is created.
Assignment 7.1: Cleaning Up the Scene File for Animation
Set up your work environment by doing the following:
1. Open Maya and set your project.
• From your computer’s desktop, go to [START > PROGRAMS] and select Maya.
• Once Maya is open go to [File > Project > Set …] and browse to your project folder then click OK.
2. Open your last saved file: Go to [File > Open] and select 06_asgn07.ma
3. Continue working in X-ray Joints Mode.
4. Make sure that your geometry is placed on a layer and that the layer is set to R for reference so that you are unable to select the geometry by mistake when working.
5. To make selection easier open your outline by going to [Window > Outliner].
6. Create a master control for the rig by doing the following:
• First create the controller by doing the following:
i. Go to [Create > NURBS primitives > Circle].
ii. In the channel box, rename the circle Master_ctrl. (You can replace the word Master with your character’s name. For example, my character’s name is Bobo, so I would rename the circle Bobo_ctrl).
iii. In perspective view, select the move tool by pressing (w) and position the Master_ctrl into place around the feet of the character.
iv. Use the scale tool by pressing (r) and resize Master_ctrl. (This control should be scaled large enough that it is OUTSIDE of the character’s feet to make it easy to select.)
v. With the Master_ctrl selected, go to [Modify > Freeze Transformations] (to return both translate and rotate values to 0 and the scale values to 1).
Creating the Master_ctrl.
7. Parent all rig controls and geometry to the Master_ctrl by doing the following:
• In the outliner, select the right_IKHand_ctrl, hold down the (ctrl) key and click on the left_IKHand_ctrl, the rightArm_ikHandle, the leftArm_ikHandle, the spine_curve, the spine_ikHandle, the upperBody_ctrl, the IK_Spine1, left_foot_ctrl, right_foot_ctrl, all of your geometry, and the master_ctrl.
• Press the (p) key to parent. (This makes the master_ctrl parent to all of the other selections.)
The OUTLINER hierarchy after parenting everything to the Master_ctrl.
8. Add constraint groups to the IK arm controls to assist in object interaction when animating by doing the following:
• In the perspective window, select the right_IKhand_ctrl, and press (ctrl+g) to group it.
• In the channel box, rename group1 right_IKhand_constraint_grp
• In the perspective window, select the left_IKhand_ctrl, and press (ctrl+g) to group it.
• In the channel box, rename group1 left_IKhand_constraint_grp
The OUTLINER hierarchy after creating the constraint groups for the IKhand controls.
9. If the Master_ctrl is moved at this point, the spine explodes out of the rig because the spine curve has two inputs of control: the cluster deformers (controlling the CVs) and the Master_ctrl (acting as a parent node). This leads to double transformations in the rig (moving twice as far as everything else).
The spine moves out of the skeletal structure because it is being controlled by both the skin deformer and the parent controller.
To solve this problem, do the following:
• In the outliner, hold down the shift key and click on the plus sign (+) next to the Master_ctrl to open the hierarchy and display the children.
• Find the spine_curve and click on it to select it.
• Press (ctrl+a) to open the attribute editor.
Unchecking the Inherits Transform on the spine curve in the Attribute Editor.
i. Select the spine_curve tab.
ii. Under Transform Attributes set the following:
1. Remove the check next to inherits transform. (This makes the spine_curve free from the parent Master_ctrl transformations.)
10. Clean up each controller in the table below by doing the following:
• In the channel box, click on the words of the channel(s) that are not used during animation for that controller.
• If the channel is white, hold down the RMB (right mouse button) and choose Lock and Hide selected.
• If the channel is orange, blue, yellow, or purple, hold down the RMB (right mouse button) and choose Hide selected.
11. Hide IK so that during animation, they are not accidentally selected and keyframed.
• Select the spine_ikHandle, spine_curve, left_heelPivot, right_heelPivot, leftArm_ikHandle, rightArm_ikHandle, leftWrist_ikHandle, rightWrist_ikHandle, leftClavicle_ikHandle, rightClavicle_ikHandle, and press (ctrl+h) to hide them.
12. Save your file as 07_asgn01.ma.
Assignment 7.2: Preparing the Scene File for Skinning
Set up your work environment by doing the following:
1. Open your last saved file: Go to [File > Open] and select 07_asgn01.ma
2. Continue working in X-ray Mode.
3. Make sure that your geometry is placed on a layer and that the layer is set to R for reference so that you are unable to select the geometry by mistake when working.
4. To make selection easier open your outline by going to [Window > Outliner].
5. Prepare the character for skinning.
a. Create a set of skinnable joints by doing the following:
i. Go to [Edit > Select all by Type > Joints].
ii. Hold the cursor over the outliner and press (f) to frame the selected joints.
iii. In the outliner, deselect the following joints from the selection by holding down the (ctrl) key and clicking on each of the following joints:
The FK spine:
FK_spine1, lower_spine_ctrl, upper_spine_ctrl, FK_spine6.
The left IK arm:
IK_left_shoulder, IK_left_elbow, IK_left_wrist, IK_left_palm.
The left FK arm:
FK_left_shoulder_ctrl, FK_left_elbow_ctrl, FK_left_wrist_ctrl, and FK_left_palm.
Creating a Quick Select Set for the skinnable joints.
IK_right_shoulder, IK_right_elbow, IK_right_wrist, IK_right_palm.
The right FK arm:
FK_right_shoulder_ctrl, FK_right_elbow_ctrl, FK_right_wrist_ctrl, and FK_right_palm.
iv. Go to [Create > Sets > Quick Select Sets].
– Enter Quick Select Set name: skinJoints.
– Click “OK”.
6. Turn IK off in the arms before binding. This is important since IK rotates the joints immediately. Because the arm position can be altered by the IK solver, it is best to key FK position in the arms for skinning. In the perspective window, click on the left_FKIK_switch, hold down the (shift) key and click the right_FKIK_switch. In the channel box, set the FKIK attribute to “0” to turn IK off.
Turning IK off in the arms.
7. Save your file as 07_asgn02.ma.
Assignment 7.3: Creating Additional Tools for Animation (Optional)
Set up your work environment by doing the following:
1. Open your last saved file: Go to [File > Open] and select 07_asgn02.ma.
2. Turn X-ray mode off if it isn’t already.
3. Make sure that your geometry is placed on a layer and that the layer is set to “R” for reference so that you are unable to select the geometry by mistake when working. (It should be by now!)
4. To make selection easier open your outline by going to [Window > Outliner].
5. Creating selection MEL buttons by doing the following:
a. With nothing selected (click in an empty area of the perspective window to be sure) go to [Window > General Editors Script Editors].
b. In the Script Editor, go to [Edit > Clear History].
c. In the perspective window, go to [Show > None].
d. In the perspective window, go to [Show > NURBS Curves].
e. In the perspective window, LMB click + drag around all curves to select them.
Selecting all of the curves in the perspective window.
f. In the shelf area, click on the CUSTOM tab.
g. In the Script Editor, LMB click + drag the entire row of MEL that appears to highlight the selection (this is the command to select all of the NURBS curves).
h. In the Script Editor, MMB click + drag the entire row of MEL onto the CUSTOM shelf.
a. Save script to shelf as type: choose MEL.
i. Add a name to the shelf button by going to [Window > Settings/Preferences > Shelf Editor] and enter the following:
Icon Name : type ‘all’.
Creating a customized selection button.
These steps can be repeated for different sections of the body controls. For example, the hand, elbow, and shoulder FK. Controls can be made into a shelf button for each arm. The spine, neck, and head controls should be a button also, as well as each IK arm and elbow, in addition to the IK foot and knee.
6. Save your file as 07_asgn03.ma
As an added challenge (which will impress all of your friends) you can create your own shelf icons in a graphics software package. The images must be pixel dimensions of 32 × 32 pixels and must be saved as a bitmap image. These are placed in the icons folder of your Maya preferences. In the Shelf Editor, click on Change Image to browse to the icons folder in your preferences.
Creating customizable shelf icons.
Using the shelf editor to change the icon image.
If you are not sure where these are stored on the computer, go to [Window > Settings/Preferences > Preferences] click the save button. Then go to [Window > General Editors > Script Editor]. The Script Editor will give you the path to the directory where your preference folder is located.