I'm James Taylor, this video is a basic intro to creating joints and skinning our
characters in Maya 2016
now to get started we want to do one of two things: we want to switch to our
RIGGING SHELF, or change our drop down to RIGGING to get access to our
rigging tools. Then I click my CREATE JOINT TOOL and create joints in the perspective view
but we'll see it doesn't give us give placement. When creating joints, we're
almost certainly going to be doing it in our orthographic views - the front
or the side view. When we do that we'll see we get much more predictable
results. I start creating joints again, but now we have a different
problem. Now our geometry obscures the joints. We need to click this button here,
X-RAY JOINTS. Now they're going to be visible no matter what. It'll make placing
joints a lot easier
Let's start placing joints. I activate my create joints tool and create a
line of joints running up the center of the character. This will be my spine.
What I want to do is use my vertex snap (hold down the V key) and snap the joints
to the center of the mesh. And right now, the bones are a little bit too large, so if
we look at our attributes in the channel box, we can see that I can adjust
that radius down to make things a little easier to work with. And if I go into my
options for Create Joint, I can also adjust the
bone length radius there, and now every new joint that I create will have that
radius. OK, let's name our joints. Our root joint is the pelvis, and the
other joints are just spine joints. I'll name them spine 1, 2, 3, etc, and we'll notice
that we're not using a literal number of spine joints. Do not try to replicate the
human skeleton - I'll talk more about that in a bit! I'll switch over to my side view,
turn on X-Ray Joints, and now I'm going to place the joints here. When we're placing
our joints we want to place them in the center of mass. We're not going to
place these where our vertebrae would be - which is to say, along the back - we're
going to place them in this center of the body. Again, these are not bones,
they are joints. They don't function like bones, so we need to place them correctly.
This means we're putting them in the center of the character's mass.
You'll note as you move the joints, you'll see that all the joints
that are children of our parent joints move at the same time. If I want to
move a joint without adjusting any of its child joints, I can hold down the
'd' key, or I can hit the 'insert' key, this will allow me to adjust the placement of a
single joint without adjusting any of the other joints in the chain. So, I have
five joints here, and that should give me good deformation. I don't need to create
as many spine joints as we have vertebrae, and again I'm not putting them
along the back. And I am going to center them, because that's going to give us proper
deformation. Now at the end of this joint chain, I have the base of the neck here,
and I move that a little bit. It sits right at the bottom of the
neck. Then I want to create a new joint for their head. Instead of using my
create joint tool, I just duplicate that existing joint. And when I duplicate it, you'll see that
it's still parented to the chest. To unparent it, hit shift+p
Then I place that joint right at the base of the skull, where the jaw and the
ear meet. Then I parent that to the base of the neck, by selecting the head first and
then shift clicking the neck, and then just hitting p
to parent it to that joint. OK let's move on and repeat this process for
the arm. I'll turn on my create joint tool, and in the front view I place the
joints for the shoulder, right up where the shoulder meets the body, and then
click to place a second joint in the wrist. I'll name these with L_
at the beginning, so L_shoulder and L_wrist, and then I
shift to my side view and position the joints in the side view using my move tool
and then I'll go to the skeleton menu click on my INSERT JOINT TOOL.
In my front view, I'll click drag from the shoulder down to the middle of the arm
to place the elbow joint. Then I''ll move the elbow joint's position while holding the d key
so that it doesn't move the wrist at the same time that I'm moving the
elbow. Now, I want to connect my shoulder to my torso, but I can't just parent it
right to the chest. I need to create an interstitial bone. I use my create joint tool
to create a new joint. It sits just off-center from the chest
this is my clavicle, and I parent my shoulder to the clavicle, and then parent
the clavicle to the chest. And now I've got a pretty good joint chain for my arm. Next
I'll repeat this same process with the legs. I create a joint for the hip and a
joint for the ankle. That hip joint will sit in the center of the mass on the hip
and the ankle definitely sits behind the hip joint. We want to make sure
that we reflect that. And then I'll use my insert joint tool to just add in
the knee by clicking and dragging from the hip down. I'll take a moment to name my new
joints. Again, we'll put their L_ in front of it. So, L_hip, L_knee,
L_ankle. Then I can parent my hip to the pelvis, by selecting the hip first,
and then shift clicking the pelvis, and hitting p
now I'm going to use a new tool: my MIRROR JOINTS tool. Mirror joints is in the
skeleton menu. And I want to go to the mirror joints options
and I want to change to the YZ MIRROR ACROSS, and then at the bottom
here, I want to search for L_ and replace with R_ . We activate it
after we've selected a joint like the hip or the clavicle, one of the joints
that sits off-center
off-center from the spine. And it will flip our joint chain across the center,
creating that mirrored biped that we need. So now that we have a basic skeleton,
let's try attaching the body to it and see what happens. So I click my body mesh, and then
shift click my pelvis, and I'll go to my skin menu and choose BIND SKIN
I'll go to the options of BIND SKIN, and change my bind method to GEODESIC VOXEL, and then I just
hit bind skin or apply. And I just want to test things out here, so I grab the
shoulder here, and I'll turn on rotate and rotate it and I'll see that I get some
problems with the way things rotate. And this is to be expected the first time we
bind a character's skin to the skeleton. Now we really run into a problem we try and
mimic certain movements of the body. So I rotate the forearm up, but we see
that if I were to do that on a real body, it would break the elbow. And the same
thing happens with the knee: I can bend it in one direction, but if I try bending the
hip in another direction - for example, I'm trying to cross my legs - we've run into
problems. So we don't have enough joints here. We need to start creating helper
joints. In my skin menu, I'll select GO TO BIND POSE, that will return my character
to its default pose. And then I go to Edit > Delete by type > History on the skin to
get rid of my skin cluster node. And now I can edit my skeleton, before I reattach
the skin. I'll start by just deleting the duplicated mirror joints, because I'm
going to be making significant changes to the original joints, and I can just mirror them later.
I go back to the skeleton menu and select my insert joint tool again, and I'm going to
start adding helper bones. The first is in the upper arm, the second is
in the forearm, and you'll see that I place them at various points along the length
of these bones. I also need a helper joint between the hip and knee. These are
roll joints. So I have a forearm roll joint, a thigh roll joint, and then up near the shoulder
I have a bicep roll joint. Next up I'll create the hand. And the hand is a
difficult area simply because there are a lot of joints in a very small region
fortunately, all the joints are basically the same thing. So we're going to create a
single finger, and then just reuse it to create the rest. Once again I use my
create joints tool to create the finger joints, and by holding SHIFT while using the
create joint tool, you can create them in a straight line. After that I just resize
them, and reposition them to roughly match the shape of one of my fingers.
Now, like a lot of joints on the body,
the fingers are only going to bend in a certain direction (unless something goes
really wrong) so I'm going to open up my joint attributes and find the
attributes called DEGREES OF FREEDOM and we'll see I turned off the X and the Z axis
attributes. This means I'll only be able to rotate the joint in a single
direction. Once that single finger is correct, I can go ahead and place it for
all the other fingers. I'll just duplicate it and reposition the joint slightly to
match the geometry of the fingers, and rotate it into place where necessary
positioning the thumb is different, however. It sits off-axis from the
rest of the hand - about 45 degrees - that means that we need to rotate those
joints to match that. In this case I've positioned the joints where I
want it, and I'm actually going to move the verts of the hand to match the position of the
joints a little bit better. It's also worth noting that first joint sits up in
the hand,
unlike the rest of the fingers. Once the fingers are set, I parent them to the
wrist joint - so again, selecting the children, and then shift clicking the
parent (the wrist) and hitting shift+p. However, with the ring and the pinky finger,
I'll create another joint. It sits right in the middle of the palm, and I parent the ring
and the pinky to that new joint, and then parent that joint to the wrist. This will
allow me to bend the hand a little bit better to create a more natural fist
shape, for example. Once I'm done setting up the limbs, I'll use my Mirror
Joints to flip my skeleton over the center line
and it's time to start weighting for real. So: Skin > Bind Skin, and I make sure Geodesic
Voxel is turned on. Then I start to pose my character, and we see that
there are all sorts of errors. The skin weighting process is really the
process of fixing these errors and specifying how we want our character
to move on this skeleton. The first tool that are going to use is the HAMMER
WEIGHTS tool. I'll go to vertex mode, select some verts in the afflicted area, and then go to
Skin > HAMMER WEIGHTS. We see that that does a good job of fixing some
errors! But if I use it in a different area, we see that it doesn't quite do
the job.
Here I'll rotate a few of the joints on the skin - this is how we can evaluate whether or
not the skin weighting is working. I'll get that into position, and then I'll start using our
primary skin weighing tool, which is our PAINT SKIN WEIGHTS TOOL. So I go the skin menu,
choose PAINT SKIN WEIGHTS, and I select the option box because we need to see the
options for the tool.
They'll pop up on the left there. Now the first thing I do is click USE COLOR RAMP,
and then I want to make sure that my PAINT OPERATION is set to ADD. And what I'll do
is leave my value at 1, and lower my opacity down to something like 0.3. This
will allow me to blend weights pretty smoothly. So white means that a vert is
100% weighted to the selected bone, whereas dark blue down to black means it's not
waited to the bone at all. So we use this heat ramp to judge how our verts are
attached to our skeleton. So I select a bone first - I can do that from the menu on
the left, or I can right click and hold over a bone and choose SELECT INFLUENCE
from the menu that pops up. Then when I start painting on my verts, it's adding
influence from the bone I selected on to that vert. The vert is going to follow that
bone more and more strongly the heavier the waiting I paint on to it. Now I can
gain greater precision over the tool going to vertex mode, and selecting
individual verts, and then reactivating the Paint Skin Weights tool. Once I do that
I can use the FLOOD option after I select a bone, so that I can just
add whatever influence I have selected to just those verts alone, without affecting any
other nearby verts. Now I've only been painting weights on half of the
character, so the character's weighting is asymmetrical. This is ok because we
can MIRROR SKIN WEIGHTS the same way we mirror our skeleton. What I'll do is select
my mesh and go to Skin > Go to Bind Pose, and then I can go back to the skin menu and
choose MIRROR SKIN WEIGHTS. And I'll go into the options just to make sure that it's
mirroring across the YZ axis. And now when I rotate my arms, I see that I get a
symmetrically deformed model, which is what we're looking for. And then I just
repeat this process over and over: so I rotate my joints to create a relatively extreme pose,
and look for verts that are deforming incorrectly, such as the verts in the lower
torso, on the front and the back here, and I right click and Select Influence on
the pelvis. In this case, the verts in the lower torso are being affected by the
spine too much, so I add influence and weight them to the pelvis, so that they are
not twisting as much. That'll create a more natural shape. Basically, I move my model
around, I look for errors in the skin deformation, and then I'll select joints
around that deformation, and add influence to the verts in that area until I get
something that's correct. For example, in the ribcage area, we'll be weighting our
verts to the spine joints so that it behaves the way that the rib cage would.
Here's another example with the leg region. In the leg,
I'll weight the area above the hips a little bit to the leg bone, but you'll see under the
leg, at the bottom of the body, I weight that almost entirely to the pelvis. And
then running down the inside of the thigh, I add a little bit of influence from the pelvis
as well. This will give me a more natural stretch when that leg bends around.
After I get things looking correct in one pose, I move the leg into a different
pose so I can adjust the verts. Here, I selected the verts in front of the thigh, and I'm
weighting those 100% to the thigh, sothat when the leg goes up, we see we get some of the
interpenetration between the body and the leg. There are some areas that we
just want to have the verts overlap. This mimics the way the muscles will
squish up against each other. The knee is a great example of where we need to
make this happen properly. All the verts above the knee are weighted 100% to that
roll joint in the thigh, and everything below the knee will be weighted 100%
to that knee joint. And then I have to split the difference in the middle. That will
give me a nice sharp knee shape. Again, below the leg, 100% weighted to the knee, and then if I
rotate my thigh to the side using that roll bone, I'll adjust the weighting of the verts in
that area, so that I get a nice smooth taper from the hip to the knee. This gives me
a nice natural roll when the leg is bent that way. Now we'll see something similar in our bicep roll joint -
I smoothly gradate the skin weights from the shoulder to elbow. What may help in some
cases is to return to the un-smoothed version of my mesh, and actually be able
to see the accurate vert locations. The low res mesh is what the Paint Skin
Weights tool is really operating on. So it can be helpful to switch to that low res mode
by just hitting '1'. Now during this process, we inevitably run into a point
where we want to make changes to the skeleton or the mesh itself. To do
that, we need to detach the skin, but retain history, so that we can make edits.
So I go to Skin > Unbind Skin, and choose the options to turn Keep History on.
Once the skin is detached, I can edit the skeleton or mesh freely. So I can
reposition the shoulder to get a more ideal deformation. And then I can mirror this
skeleton again, and bind the skin. We see that when we rebind it, we do have
problems, but once we Mirror Skin Weights, our mesh should work as
normal. However, now we've got updated joint positions that will work better for
animation. Unbinding my mesh also allows me the opportunity to make basic
structural changes to the geometry. So I grab the edge ring around the elbow
and I use my Bevel tool
on those edges with my segments set to 2, to split that one ring around the elbow into 3 rows.
I massage that geometry little bit, but what I can now do is I can
weight that top row 100% to the bicep, and I can weight that bottom row 100% to the forearm
The row in the middle row splits the difference, so I get a much more
predictable and more natural-looking deformation in that region. I repeat this
process on the wrist, so that I get those three rows sitting on the wrist, and I'll
do the same thing for the joints of the fingers as well. So I just bevel
and a segment in there to give me three rows for each knuckle. And we do this now
because it's easier to subdivide after the fact, than it is trying to do it
while we're working on anatomy. I add the same three rows on the knee, and with the
knee I want these rows to tilt down towards the front of the knee. and bring
them up a little bit in the back. That gives me a little bit better deformation
there. Now once we add all these extra verts and edges, it can be a pain in the
butt to Paint Skin Weights. So we're going to use our Component Editor. Go to Windows > General Editors >
General Editors > Component Editor. The Component Editor allows us to type in values for her skin
weights. In the Component Editor, I select the Smooth Skin tab
tab, and then I just need to select rows of verts, and I can type in
values for which bone I want them to be attached to in the Component Editor.
For example, I select these top two rows on the middle finger here, and I want to
weight those 100% to the middle finger joints. So I select all the values for
those verts and type in 1. That will weight them 100% to that joint. All the other
joint influences will disappear. I'll repeat this for the middle finger - I
select those rows of verts, weight them 100% to the middle finger joint, and do the same thing
for the tip, and then I can split the difference for the knuckles that are in
between. In this way,
weighting the fingers, weighting the elbow, weighting the
wrist and the knee becomes very quick and easy. Once I've got those fingers
setup, I will be able to select all the joints of the hands and add just a little
bit of rotation to them. That'll get a nice natural curvature to the fingers.
And relaxing the hands is one of the most important parts of posing a
character. It really adds a lot to the feel of the character, instead of just a very
stiff model. We eventually we get to this point with our character - the skin weighting is
done, and the joints are placed correctly. Then we can start posing the character.
I do that by creating keyframes on different frames of my time slider. That
way, I can just switch frames to switch back and forth from a conservative pose
to an agressive pose like this. And I can use these poses to tweak my weighting and
to show off the character. OK! That's it for the basics of Maya 2016's Joints and Skinning. Next
we're going to look at the DELTA MUSH modifier, which makes skinning much much easier.
then we'll look at the HUMAN IK rig that's included in Maya, it's a great quick way to
start animating our character. Ok, that's it for the intro to joints and skinning, I'm James Taylor, thanks
for watching!