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Hi guys.

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Welcome back to Game Character Rigging with Houdini.

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In this video, we're going to make our first digital asset.

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It's not going to be too taxing, but I think it's quite an important tool to have and I tend to get

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a lot of use out of it, especially in rigging.

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So what is it?

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Well, it's a rig pen, which is just a simple control object that we can drop into Houdini.

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And what it does is basically a pen shaped thing like that with parameters for the length.

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So we can adjust the length and parameters for the radius of the sphere as well.

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And what we use this for is in certain situations, the the transformation handles and the objects that

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an animator wants to manipulate can be sort of quite hidden within the volume of the geometry.

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So it's often useful to provide a very clear indication of something that the animator can grab on to.

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So the plan for our character model is we're going to have a rig pinned to control the jaw.

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So if you imagine the jaws pivot point being back here, the rig pen will stick out through the bottom

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of his chin and pop out there indicating to the animator that that's a control that you can grab onto.

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Likewise for the head, the pivot point will be down here somewhere, but we'll have a control object

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at the top of his head again, indicating to the animator that that's an object that you can grab onto

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to control the relevant body parts.

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You'll see these quite a lot in animation rigs and they're really useful.

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I tend to put some as well the shoulder blades facing back as well.

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So just to make it easier to sort of box select those control objects if you want to rotate both shoulders

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at the same time, some rigs like to use them for the finger joints, so you might find them sort of

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looking like this.

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So you can very quickly just drag a box selection to grab all those three control objects and animate

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them as you see, as you see fit.

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So with that, like I said, it's not the most taxing piece of digital art that will do.

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However, it is very useful.

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So let's get started.

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I'm going to drop down a geometry note.

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I'm going to give it the name pin.

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It's going to make a little bit of space for myself in the network view.

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I'm going to drop down a sphere.

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On the line

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and a copy, two points.

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So we want to copy the sphere to the line.

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Okay.

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I'm just going to drop the size of that sphere down.

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So it's going to middle, click and drag to create a pen type looking thing.

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And in the two points, you can see we are copying it to both points.

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We don't want that.

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So we can just specify a point number one to copy it to the top and then merge those two streams together.

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So we get a complete object.

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And there we go.

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Those are pen.

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And at the end, I'm just going to append a color node so we can set a color and give it my default

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rig green, which indicates a control object.

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Okay.

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So there we go.

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That was pretty taxing.

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I'm sure you'll agree.

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So I'm going to jump up a level and I'm going to right click on that and create a digital asset.

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Okay.

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So you pop up with the digital asset creation.

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I'm going to save that to my HDR in my hit folder.

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So if you remember back to the project that we created at the start hit point to that project.

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And in my HDR folder, I'm just going to call Rick Pen Digital Asset.

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Rick Pen.

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Rick Pen.

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That all seems good.

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So I'm going to hit except.

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Okay.

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So we're just going to revert that layout.

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And in the parameters, the basic parameters, here we go.

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So we can specify that it requires and inputs a maximum input of one we're not really to foster by having

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a minimum and but maximum input is going to be one.

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We don't want to ever have more than one input to this.

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It's going to be basically used just to grab transformations.

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Okay.

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So over in the parameters, we can sort of we can we don't need to see the render tab so we can make

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that invisible and the misc type as well.

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We don't really need to see that so we can make those things invisible.

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The transforms obviously very important to as and we'll want to make sure that those positions and rotations

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are available.

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You could, as this is a fold kinematic control primarily you could hide the translate and just focus

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on the rotate.

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We shouldn't ever need to use pivot, pivot, translate or pivot rotate so you could possibly hide them.

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But just for the sake of this, I'm going to I'm going to keep them all visible.

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Okay.

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So now we need to populate this with the parameters that we want to to add to our digital assets.

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So to do that, I'm going to drag across a folder and drop it on the root.

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And call it rig ten parameters.

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Apply that, and I'm just going to dive into my rec pin asset.

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And grab the sphere uniform scale and just drag that into my rec pin folder.

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I'm going to grab the length.

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And drag that into the rec pen.

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Also going to drag this direction because this will come in handy.

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And put that in there as well.

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I'm also going to grab this color so we can specify a color for our pen.

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And with that we should be pretty much done, apply and accept.

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So if we jump up now, we've got a neat folder where we can manipulate how we need this pen to look,

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and we've got access to the transformations as well on there so we can set key frames and things like

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that.

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One more tweak that I want to I want to do that's quite important is the rotation order of this control

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object needs to be aligned with our bones, as we've mentioned before.

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If you think back to the distant past, when we looked at the Rubik's Cube analogy whereby if you know,

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we need to know the rotation of the Rubik's, we need to know which way up to hold the Rubik's Cube

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involved in order to solve it.

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Likewise, this big pen needs to match the bones rotation order and the bones rotation order by default

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is opposite r y x.

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So we'll make sure our rec pen has that very same rotation order so that Houdini can translate our input

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into the correct rotation.

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So that's quite an important step.

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So with that, we're going to save that note type and match the current definition just to lock it back

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up again.

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So that's.

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That's saved it to a desk now so we can simply drop down our rec pin.

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And there is, in fact, is that one.

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And I've got a couple in there from previous builds, so don't worry about that.

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You should have it in your digital assets folder.

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Okay.

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So one sort of visual tweak that I like to make just to indicate control objects in my network view

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is I like to set the shape to the circle and if you want it to come as default, you can hold down control,

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grab the shape and drop it onto the notes.

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That will save that shape as a as a default, if you like.

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So I find that quite useful.

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Likewise, on the color, I tend to set all my animal friendly control objects to this light green.

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It makes them very easy to see.

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And again, if you just hold down control, you can drag a color onto a note and that will save it as

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a default.

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So every time you drop down a rec pin, it comes in with with the look that you that you're expecting.

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Okay.

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So like I said, it's not the most exciting piece of digital art that we'll ever do, but it's, you

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know, a useful tool.

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And we can position these where we need them to be.

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We can alter the direction of them so we can make sure the orientations are correct.

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Yeah.

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So useful.

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What I'd like to do as well is make it super easy to grab.

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So what I can do is I can just grab the digital asset and drop it onto my rigging shelf tool.

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Okay, so now to place one of these down is just a matter of clicking and where's it gone?

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There is just a matter of clicking on the on our shelf tool icon, which is really quick and useful,

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admittedly not maybe as quick as just tapping tab and typing it out, but you know, it makes it makes

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good sense to have it visible.

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One tweak I'm going to make finally is just to tweak the icon.

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So I'm going to jump over to options.

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And I've managed to find an icon in the rigid body tab that is looks pin like, so we're going to borrow

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that.

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So it's the rigid body parent constraint.

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We're going to copy and paste that in there.

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So I'm going to apply and accept this cancel out of that.

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So if you look now, we've got a nice little rec pin icon on our custom shelf tool, so make it really

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quick just to drop down our new rick pins.

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Okay.

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Like I said, not the most exciting piece of digital art will do today.

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But I think for the next couple of videos, we're going to jump into some python code and populate the

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two useful tools that we've put on our.

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On our shelf there.

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So I hope you ready to do a bit of coding.

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And I shall see you hopefully in the next video.

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Thank you.