Lesson 5: Connecting Everything

Select your clavicle joint and do a parent constrain it to the spine, so wherever the spine moves, the arm is connected. Then select the clavicle control and parent it under the top Fk spine control. Do the same for the other side. Next, select your femur then the pelvis and press P to parent it. Connect the femur curve control to the base FK spine control. Do the same for the other side and for the tail.

Next, Make a new control that is going to be named master control. Group it, make it arrowed shape and place it under the character. Five things will be parented to this control: the two feet controls, the two hand controls and the pelvis. With this control we can move our character around, but there is one last step that we need to do. When we translate our character it moves just fine, but when we rotate it the geometry goes a little crazy. So lets create a locator group it and place it behind the character around the height of the head. This locator is known as a roll solver. Parent it under the spine base control and go to the attributes of the of the IK spline. Go to IK solver and click on the option that says twist controls, world up and object up, then in world up object you must down the name of your locator and the problem is fixed.

Now lets mesh the geometry with the joints. On the hypergraph select all your bind joints, the tail joints and the spine joints and the pelvis joint. Click on create and select set. Make a new set and call it bind_joints. With this you can select and deselect your joints by only clicking on your bind_joints set. With you joints selected, shift click the geometry and go to the tab that says skin. There select the bind skin and then the smooth bind. Click on the small option square on the right of it and choose in bind to: selected joints. Then in bind method: closest distance and then click on bind skin. Almost done! Save your file!

Now, our final step is the weigh paint. If you move any control you can observe that the geometry wrecks in some places, so the weigh painting is basically assigning the joints that are the closest to that part on the geometry a weigh influence so that it can deform a little but still look natural. So select you geometry, then the weigh paint tool and begin to paint. To see the deformations you must animate some controllers and fix the problems. To choose the joints that you want to work on go to the advance3d attributes and you can select there the joints that is being worked on, the intensity on the brush, and your brush options such as replace, smooth, add and scale. Recommendation: weigh painting is very tricky, be very careful when you paints because sometimes with out knowing you are placing influence in other parts of the geometry that are not the ones that you wish to affect. Also, if you did one paint brush that didn’t you want do not click ctrl z, Maya and the weigh painting usually make things worse with that command, so just try to fix it. Save your file constantly!