Hi guys.
Welcome back to Game Character Rigging with Houdini.
My name is Richard.
In the next couple of videos, we're going to make another really helpful digital asset for our rigging
process.
And this one I've called the Rig Helper not a particularly inspired name.
I'm just going to put them down so we can take a look at its functionality.
And though is it's a simple empty object with just a couple of buttons on there and somewhere to place
a list of nodes.
So the thinking behind this digital asset is just to sort of aid the animation process.
So we're here with our crazy spider leg thing that we've been working on in previous videos.
RFK controls are all set up.
So now, for example, if we wanted to go ahead and sort of animate this, so just position it.
Press Key Okay, to put down a keyframe, move the time slider.
So press key K again to put another keyframe down.
And we're starting to build some animation on our spider leg now to get to get these reset to back to
their resting position.
Ready for the next animation, we'd have to select all our control objects.
Place in zeros.
And remember to put down a key as well, otherwise we'd lose those changes.
Again, that's not particularly user friendly.
There are easy ways to do it, and we do that with our rig help tool.
As you can see, there's a couple of buttons at the top here.
We've got 1401 for hide and one to drop a key frame.
Okay, so I'll just go over a bit of the functionality of this note and then we'll jump straight into
making a replica of it from scratch.
So the rig helper requires a list of nodes and you can pick them using the the of the.
So if we point to all our control objects and select them.
That's made the connection between the digital asset and our control objects.
So now we can zero them all out.
We can also hide them should we need to or should the animator need to.
And we can also have a global button that place key frames on them.
Now this comes in really, really handy.
If, for example, if we imagine this as a, say, a spider's leg, for example, if we had seven or
either of these, it'd be really useful to be able to isolate the one that we're working on by hiding
the controls.
It'd be really useful to have a global control to reset the leg back to zero, and again, a simple
key button to place key frames on all the objects.
The other good thing about doing this system is we can place down multiple of these rig helpers and
they can be linked to specific areas.
So if we had again, just as an example and I'm just going to temporarily make another copy and drag
this guy, so say we've got spider leg number two.
Now, the Rick Helper that we've copied is completely independent of that.
So as you can see, if we wanted to animate this leg in particular, we might just hide these controls
out of the way just so we can really focus in on these.
And then when we've done all our animations, we can say, Yeah, we're done with that.
We can hide those and move across onto this and then start our animation process again.
Okay.
And then just sort of grab the, the nodes, etc..
So what we're going to do in the next couple of videos, we're going to build this digital asset from
scratch.
And then as we progress on to build our zombie rig, this these rig helper nodes will become the sort
of the backbone of our digital asset for the zombie.
So we're just going to use lots and lots of these and promote these parameters up to the digital asset
level.
So hopefully you can see the use pretty useful tool in the next video.
We'll start building it.
So thank you very much for watching and I'll see you next time.