Hi guys welcome back to game character rigging with her.
In this video we're going to make our first digital asset.
It's not gonna be too taxing but I think it's quite an important little tool to have and I tend to get
a lot of use out of it especially intriguing.
So what is it.
Well it's a rig pen which is just a simple control object that we can drop into.
Houdini and what it does is basically a pen shaped thing like that with parameters for the length so
we can adjust the length and parameters for the radius of this sphere as well.
And what we use this for is in certain situations the transformation handles and the objects that an
animator wants to manipulate can be sort of quite hidden within the volume of the geometry.
So it's often useful to provide a very clear indication of something that the animator can grab onto.
So the plan for our character model is we're going to have a rig PINNED TO CONTROL THE JAW.
SO IF YOU IMAGINE THE JAWS pivot point being back here the rig pen will stick out through the bottom
of his chin and pop out there indicating to the animator that that's a control that you can grab onto.
Likewise for the head the pivot point will be down here somewhere.
But we'll have a control object at the top of his head again indicating to the enemy that that's an
object that you can grab on to to control the relevant body parts.
You'll see these quite a lot in animation rigs and they're really useful.
I tend to put some as well at the shoulder blades facing back as well sort of just to make it easier
to sort of box select those control objects if you want to rotate both shoulders at the same time.
Some rigs like to use them for the finger joint so you might find them sort of looking like this so
you can very quickly just drag a box selection to grab all those three control objects and animate them
as you see as you see fit.
So with that like I said it's not the most taxing piece of digital art that will do.
However it is very useful so let's get started.
I'm going to drop down a geometry note.
I'm going to give it the name rig pen.
It's going to make a little bit of space for myself in the network.
You know I'm going to drop down a sphere and the line
and a couple two points.
So we want to copy the sphere to the line.
OK I'm just going to drop the size of that sphere down to the middle click and drag to create a pen
type looking thing in the cockpit points.
You can see we are copying it to both points.
We don't want that.
So we can just specify point number one to copy it to the top and then merge those two streams together.
So we get a complete object and then we go those are rig pen.
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
green which indicates a control object.
So there we go.
That was pretty taxing.
I'm sure you'll agree.
So I'm going to jump up a level and I'm going to right click on that and create a digital asset.
OK.
So you pop up with the digital asset creation.
I'm going to save that to my HDI in my hip folder.
So if you remember back to the project that we created at the start dollar hit points to that project
and in my HDI folder I'm just going to call rick payne digital asset rick payne rick payne all seems
good.
So I'm going to hit except
OK.
So we're just going to revert that layout.
And in the parameters the basic parameters here we go so we can specify that it requires an input some
maximum input of one.
We're not really too fussed about having a minimum input but maximum input is going to be one we don't
want to ever have more than one input to this.
It's going to be basically use just to grab transformations.
OK.
So over in the parameters
we can sort of we can.
We don't need to see the render tab so we can make that invisible and the misc tab as well we don't
really need to see that.
So we can make those things invisible the transforms obviously very important to us and will want to
make sure that those positions and rotations are available.
You could as this is a forward cinematic control primarily you could hide the translate and just focus
on the rotate.
We shouldn't ever need to use pivot pivot translate or pivot rotate so you could possibly hide them
but just for the sake of this I'm going to I'm going to keep them all visible.
OK.
So now we need to populate this with the parameters that we want to to add to our digital assets so
to do that I'm gonna drag across a folder and drop it on the root I'd call it rig 10 parameters.
Apply that and I'm just gonna dive into my rig pin asset
and grab the sphere uniform scale and just drag that into my rig pen folder.
I'm going to grab the length
and drag that into the rig pen.
Also gonna drag this direction because this will come in handy and put that in there as well.
I'm also gonna grab this collar so we can specify a collar for our pin and with that we should be pretty
much done.
Apply and accept.
So if we jump up now we've got a neat folder where we can manipulate how we need this pen to look.
And we've got access to the transformations as well on there so we can set key frames and things like
that.
One more tweak that I want to I want to do.
That's quite important is the rotation order of this control object needs to be aligned with our bones.
As we've mentioned before if you think back to the distant past when we looked at the Rubik's Cube analogy
whereby if you know we need to know the rotation of the Rubik's that we need to know which way up to
hold the Rubik's Cube you know in order to solve it.
Likewise this rig pin needs to match the bones rotation order and the bones rotation order by default
is us that are y are X so we'll make sure our Rick Payne has that very same rotation order so that Houdini
can translate our input into the correct rotation.
So that's a quite an important step.
So with that we're going to save that know type and match the current definition just to lock it back
up again.
So that's that's saved it's a desk now so we can simply drop down our Rick pin and there it is.
Okay.
In fact is that one and I've got a couple in there from previous builds.
So don't worry about that you should have it in your digital assets folder.
Okay so 1 so a visual tweak that I like to make.
Just to indicate control objects in my network view is I like to set the shape to the circle.
And if you want it to come as default you can hold down control grab the shape and drop it onto the
notes that will save that shape as a default if you like.
So I find that quite useful.
Likewise on the color I tend to set all my Anna a friendly control objects to this light green it makes
them very easy to see and again if you just hold down control you can drag a color onto a node and that
will save it as a default.
So every time you drop down a rig pin it comes in with with the look that you that you're expecting.
Okay.
So like I said not the most exciting piece of digital art that will ever do but it's you know a useful
tool and we can position knees where we need them to be.
We can alter the direction of them so we can make sure the orientations are correct.
Yep.
So useful.
What I'd like to do as well is make it super easy to grab.
So what I can do is I can just grab the digital asset and drop it onto my rigging shelf tool.
Okay so now to place one of these down is just a matter of clicking why has it gone.
There is just a matter of clicking on the on our shelf tool icon which is really quick and useful.
It lay not maybe as quick as just typing tab and typing it out but you know it makes it makes good sense
to have it visible.
One tweak I'm going to make finally is just to tweak the icon so I'm gonna jump over to options and
I've managed to find an icon in the rigid bodies tab that is looks pin like so we're going to borrow
that.
So it's the rigid body parent constraint I'm going to copy and paste that in there.
So I'm going to apply and accept this cancel out of that.
So if you look now we've got a nice little rig pin icon on our custom shelf tool so make it really quick
just to drop down our new rig pins OK.
Like I said not the most exciting piece of digital art will do today but I think for the next couple
of videos we're going to jump into some Python code and populate these two useful tools that we've put
on our on our shelf there.
So I hope you're ready to do a bit of coding and I shall see you hopefully in the next video.
Thank you.