Chapter 15. Finalize and Clean Up

CD Files

Kila_Skinned.mb

Kila_Final.mb

Grae_Skinned.mb

Grae_Final.mb

KilaBody.tga

KilaHair.tga

KilaHead.tga

GraeBody.tga

GraeMisc.tga

GraeWing.tga

GraeBody_Bump.tga

GraeMisc_Bump.tga

GraeBody_Spec.tga

GraeMisc_Spec.tga

You have your model; it’s rigged and ready to go, right? Wrong. If you pass Kila and Grae to your animator in their present state, it’s a sure thing that within a week he or she will have broken them by accidentally moving some part of the rig they shouldn’t have.

Here in this chapter we will talk about how to clean up the scene and lock off any controls to which the animator should not have access. Additionally, we will introduce the use of character sets and the significant role they play in animation.

What we want to do now is a final major clean up of the scene, removing anything that is no longer of use. Both rigs are almost identical, so we’ll concentrate mainly on Kila. Along the way, I’ll point out places where the workflow may differ when you work through these steps on Grae.

Load in the file called Kila_Skinned.mb (for Grae, load Grae_Skinned.mb).

1. Go to File > Optimize Scene Size and open the options (Figure 15.1). This tool will scan the scene and delete any unused objects and nodes.

2. Enable all the options. Click on Optimize, and the scene will quickly be optimized.

3. You no longer need the image planes, so remove them next, by going to Edit > Delete All by Type > Image Planes.

4. Look at the Layer Editor. There are no longer any image planes in the scene, so delete the ImagePlanes layer by right-clicking it and selecting Delete.

5. Because the visibility of the layers is now controlled with the LOD group, there isn’t much point in having separate layers for each of Kila’s LODs. Delete all but the first layer and rename this to Kila. (For Grae, remember that he has one more LOD than Kila.)

6. Use the Outliner to select the KilaLOD group. Place it in the Kila layer, setting it to Reference when you’re done so that nobody can select the character mesh.

7. If two characters were in the same scene, their skeleton layers might be easily confused. To avoid this, rename the Kila layer to Kila_BaseSkel. (Create a similar layer name for Grae.) Turn off its visibility and set its display type to Reference.

The scenes are now clean and tidy, with nothing remaining that is not relevant to the character or their rigs.

In its present state, the rig can easily be broken. Almost all of the controls can be moved away from the rig, but they need to stay locked to it. Another concern is that you want only the rotations to be available to the animator; as it is, however, the translations and even the scale attributes are freely available to edit. All of this can have disastrous results.

In this section we will look into locking off all the attributes we don’t want anyone to use, with the help of the Channel Control window. This tool allows us to make attributes nonkeyable, meaning the animator cannot place keyframes on them. The animator can still move an object using the manipulators, but we can lock the specific attributes that we don’t want to be editable.

The beauty of the Channel Control tool is that with “Change all selected objects of the same type” enabled you can work on a number of objects at the same time (as long as they are of the same type), which speeds up the whole process.

1. Open the Channel Control window by going to Window > General Editors > Channel Control. As you can see in Figure 15.2a, the window is empty because we don’t have anything selected.

2. Select all the finger icons for both hands, including the thumbs and the palm area. These will be automatically loaded into the Channel Control window (Figure 15.2b).

3. You are now in the Keyable tab of Channel Control. This tells you that the attributes on the left can have keyframes applied to them; the ones on the right cannot.

As demonstrated in Figure 15.2c, select all the rotate, scale, translate, and visibility attributes in the Keyable list on the left.

4. Notice that the Move >> button is now enabled; click on this now to move the selected attributes across to the Non-Keyable list on the right, leaving only the ones we want available to animate (Figure 15.2d).

Although you’ve now ensured that keys can no longer be set on the finger icons’ main attributes, they can be selected and moved, rotated, or even scaled, which we don’t want to occur. We need to lock these attributes so that their values cannot be altered.

1. Click on the Locked tab; the window will change to show what is currently locked in the left panel, and unlocked in the right panel (Figure 15.3, top). At present, nothing is locked.

2. Scroll down the Non-Locked list on the right and select the translate, rotate, scale, and visibility attributes.

3. Now the << Move button is enabled. Click on it to move those selected attributes across to the Locked list (Figure 15.3, bottom).

So the hand icons are locked, and only the attributes that control the fingers are available to be animated. Let’s now clean up the rest of the hand.

1. Select both the palm icons again and press the Up Arrow key, which will select the groups above these icons in the hierarchy. Although these are not visible, the animator could quite easily select them and probably animate them. We need to lock all the attributes as well as make them all nonkeyable.

2. In the Keyable tab of the Channel Control window, make sure all the attributes are moved across to the Non-Keyable side.

3. Switch to the Locked tab, and move the translate, rotate, and scale attributes across so that they are locked.

You will notice that we omitted the visibility attribute in the preceding steps. This is because, unlike with the other finger icons, the visibility icon controls this attribute. Locking the visibility attribute here would lock it in its current state, so the visibility icon would have no effect.

Now that we know how the Channel Control window operates, we can start to work on a larger scale. Let’s start with all the icons whose movement is based only on rotations.

1. Select the control handles that allow you to animate shoulders, elbows, and wrists on both the left and right sides.

2. Make the translate, scale, and visibility attributes all nonkeyable, and lock them in the Locked tab. (In this case, we can lock the visibility attribute because it isn’t directly controlled by the visibility icon.)

3. Select the waist control icon, the neck rotation icon, and all three spine icons and make them nonkeyable. Lock the translate, scale, and visibility attributes.

Note that we have to do these separately from the arms because they are different object types.

Next, we will look at the icons that translate only.

1. Select both arm IK controllers and all four elbow and knee position icons.

2. Add to this selection both breast icons and the main chest group—just select the handle in between each breast icon. (Needless to say, you can skip this step for Grae.)

3. We aren’t finished yet. Also include in this selection the main head icon, both eye icons, and the main eye group.

4. Finally, add all five of Kila’s hair control handles and the two clavicle controllers.

5. Now make all the rotation, scale, and visibility icons nonkeyable and lock them.

For the last group, we just need to lock and make nonkeyable the scale attributes, since we need to animate the translations and rotations.

1. Select both feet and the main root control.

2. Make them nonkeyable, and lock the scale attributes.

3. The visibility icon controls the visibility attributes on these icons, so you can’t lock them; but do set them to be nonkeyable.

That’s it; the main rig is cleaned up nicely. Now we need to go in and lock the controls that are not immediately visible.

1. Using the Outliner, select the HeadRotation and HairSwing groups that exist just above the hair and head controllers in the hierarchy. If you are working on Grae at this point, select the WingControls group, too.

2. Add to this selection the KilaVisibility (Figure 15.4) icon.

3. In the Channel Control window, make all the translate, rotate, scale, and visibility attributes nonkeyable, and lock all the same attributes except visibility.

For the next step, let’s try selecting using the selection field rather than the Outliner.

1. In the selection field on the status line, type in HairHelper (Figure 15.5). This selects the locator we created to help us control the hair’s movement.

2. Now lock and make nonkeyable all the main translate, rotate, scale, and visibility attributes.

3. We don’t directly manipulate the IK handles in the scene, so we can safely lock these. First select them all by going to Edit > Select All By Type > IK Handles. Make everything nonkeyable, but only lock the main translate, rotate, scale, and visibility attributes.

4. Finally, there are two joints that have evaded us so far. These exist at the end of the control arms and are called L_ConWrist and R_ConWrist. Like the IK handles, these joints are not animated directly; instead, we use the L_ConHand and R_ConHand joints to animate them. Therefore you can safely make all attributes of these joints nonkeyable, and lock the main translate, rotate, scale, and visibility attributes.

Your rig should now be tamper proof; having available only the attributes that should be animated will avoid future problems with the rig.

Check to make sure you have not missed any controllers, visible or otherwise, before you continue. It’s best to do this first in the Outliner because each object will be clearly listed. In addition, go through each icon in the view panel, since this is how the animator will interact with the character.

Another benefit of character sets is that you can use them in conjunction with the Trax Editor (Window > Animation Editors > Trax Editor) to store the animation data in clips. These can then be exported and stored for future use, even on other characters. You’ll find more discussion of the Trax Editor in Chapter 16, “Animating for Games.”

In addition to the main character set, you can have subcharacter sets that lie beneath the main one. These are useful when you need to divide up your character. For our Kila and Grae characters, we’ll set up a subcharacter set for the upper body animation and another for the lower body animation. We can then export and import animation onto these subcharacter sets separately, enabling the mixing and matching of various animations to create new ones. We can even have another separate subcharacter set for Grae’s wings.

So let’s first create the main character set for Kila.

1. Go to Character > Create Character Set and open the options seen in Figure 15.6. This is where you will give the character set a name and ask Maya to include some attributes in its initial creation.

2. Name the character set Kila_CS to indicate that it belongs to Kila and that it’s a character set, just in case more than one character is imported into the scene. In the Character Set Attributes, enable the From Channel Box item.

3. We want this main character set to hold all the facial animation, so before we create it, select the main head icon. In the Channel Box, select all the attributes associated with facial animation.

4. When everything is selected, click on Create Character Set. In the bottom-right corner of the window, below the Time Slider controls, you will see that the character set has also been activated (Figure 15.7).

You will also notice that for the selected objects, the name Kila_CS will appear under the Inputs section in the Channel Box. This is to indicate that the character set is connected to the object’s attributes.

Now we need to add the eyes to this character set as part of the facial animation.

1. Select each eye icon and then the main eye controller group.

2. Select all the translate attributes in the Channel Box.

3. Go to Character > Add to Character Set, and the selected attributes will be added.

We now have our main character and it holds all the relevant attributes that can have animation applied. Let’s now create the two subcharacter sets, which will hold all the attributes for the upper and lower body.

1. Go to Character > Create Subcharacter Set and open the options. As you can see in Figure 15.8, they are identical to the ones for the main character set.

2. First type in the name UpperBody and set Subcharacter Set Attributes to All Keyable. Making sure you have nothing selected in the scene, click on Apply. (You want to leave this character set empty for now because you’re going to create the lower body set directly after this.)

3. Type the name LowerBody into the Name field and, using the same settings as for UpperBody, click on Apply. Close the window when you’re done.

4. Because these are subcharacters, they will not be activated, so now we need to activate the UpperBody set. You can do this in either of two ways:

Click on the red down arrow to the right of the Time Slider, where Kila_CS is currently displayed as the active character set. Then select the appropriate subcharacter set from the menu.

Go to Character > Set Current Character Set Kila_CS > UpperBody.

Now all you need to do is add all the upper body icons’ attributes to the subcharacter. You will work your way through each of the upper body icons, the spine joints, clavicles, arms, hands, hair, neck, and head.

1. First select an icon and then highlight all its attributes in the Channel Box.

2. Go to Character > Add to Character Set, and the attributes are added.

3. Finally, switch to the LowerBody subcharacter set and add to it the Waist_Control, Root_Control, both knee controllers, and foot icon attributes. Remember to ignore the ikBlend attributes.

The main character sets are now set up and can be used to safely store and transfer animation between characters.

At this point you might want to store the default pose so you can quickly get back to it. In doing this, you will get your first taste of animation by setting a keyframe. With most game engines, the first frame (or in some cases frame -1) has to be the character in this default pose. Now that we have the character sets, we can do this quickly.

1. Either select the Kila_CS character set in the Outliner, or go to Character > Select Character Set Node > Kila_CS.

2. Then, making sure the Time Slider is set to 0, right-click in the Channel Box and select Key All.

3. Do the same for the UpperBody and LowerBody subcharacter sets, and you’re done.

Save this final scene as Kila_Final.mb.

If you haven’t already, clean up Grae’s scene and rig. Then create character sets for him similar to those you’ve done for Kila. Save his scene as Grae_Final.mb.

There’s one final chapter for you to work through. Now that the characters are completely modeled, rigged, and optimized, you’re ready to study the techniques for animation in games.