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Hi guys welcome back to game character rigging with her.

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

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

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a lot of use out of it especially intriguing.

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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.

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Houdini and what it does is basically a pen shaped thing like that with parameters for the length so

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

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

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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 onto.

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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.

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But we'll have a control object at the top of his head again indicating to the enemy that that's an

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object that you can grab on to 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 at the shoulder blades facing back as well sort of just to make it easier

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to sort of box select those control objects if you want to rotate both shoulders at the same time.

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Some rigs like to use them for the finger joint so you might find them sort of looking like this so

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

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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 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 rig pen.

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

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You know I'm going to drop down a sphere and the line

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and a couple two points.

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So we want to copy the sphere to the line.

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OK I'm just going to drop the size of that sphere down to the middle click and drag to create a pen

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type looking thing in the cockpit points.

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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 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 and then we go those are rig pen.

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

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green which indicates a control object.

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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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OK.

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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 HDI in my hip folder.

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So if you remember back to the project that we created at the start dollar hit points to that project

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and in my HDI folder I'm just going to call rick payne digital asset rick payne rick payne all seems

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good.

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So I'm going to hit except

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OK.

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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 so we can specify that it requires an input some

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maximum input of one.

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We're not really too fussed about having a minimum input but maximum input is going to be one we don't

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want to ever have more than one input to this.

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

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OK.

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So over in the parameters

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we can sort of we can.

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We don't need to see the render tab so we can make that invisible and the misc tab as well we don't

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really need to see that.

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So we can make those things invisible the transforms obviously very important to us and will want to

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make sure that those positions and rotations are available.

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You could as this is a forward cinematic 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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OK.

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

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to do that I'm gonna drag across a folder and drop it on the root I'd call it rig 10 parameters.

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Apply that and I'm just gonna dive into my rig pin asset

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and grab the sphere uniform scale and just drag that into my rig pen folder.

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I'm going to grab the length

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and drag that into the rig pen.

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Also gonna drag this direction because this will come in handy and put that in there as well.

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I'm also gonna grab this collar so we can specify a collar for our pin and with that we should be pretty

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much done.

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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.

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That's quite important is the rotation order of this control object needs to be aligned with our bones.

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As we've mentioned before if you think back to the distant past when we looked at the Rubik's Cube analogy

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whereby if you know we need to know the rotation of the Rubik's that we need to know which way up to

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hold the Rubik's Cube you know in order to solve it.

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Likewise this rig pin needs to match the bones rotation order and the bones rotation order by default

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is us that are y are X so we'll make sure our Rick Payne has that very same rotation order so that Houdini

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can translate our input into the correct rotation.

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So that's a quite an important step.

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

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up again.

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So that's that's saved it's a desk now so we can simply drop down our Rick pin and there it is.

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Okay.

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In fact is that one and I've got a couple in there from previous builds.

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So don't worry about that you should have it in your digital assets folder.

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Okay so 1 so a visual tweak that I like to make.

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Just to indicate control objects in my network view is I like to set the shape to the circle.

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And if you want it to come as default you can hold down control grab the shape and drop it onto the

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notes that will save that shape 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 Anna a friendly control objects to this light green it makes

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them very easy to see and again if you just hold down control you can drag a color onto a node and that

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will save it as a default.

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So every time you drop down a rig 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 not the most exciting piece of digital art that will ever do but it's you know a useful

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tool and we can position knees 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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Yep.

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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 why has 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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It lay not maybe as quick as just typing tab and typing it out but you know it makes it makes good sense

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to have it visible.

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One tweak I'm going to make finally is just to tweak the icon so I'm gonna jump over to options and

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I've managed to find an icon in the rigid bodies 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 I'm 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 rig pin icon on our custom shelf tool so make it really quick

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just to drop down our new rig pins OK.

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Like I said not the most exciting piece of digital art will do today but I think for the next couple

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of videos we're going to jump into some Python code and populate these two useful tools that we've put

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on our on our shelf there.

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So I hope you're ready to do a bit of coding and I shall see you hopefully in the next video.

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Thank you.