Indie Game Development Pipeline Volume 6: Hero Character Rigging and Animation
In this volume of the Indie Game Development Pipeline, we'll learn about the process used to create animated assets for Unity with the help of Maya LT, a version of Maya specifically geared towards artists that would like to build their own games.
What you'll learn
In this volume of the Indie Game Development Pipeline, we'll learn about the process used to create animated assets for Unity with the help of Maya LT, a version of Maya specifically geared towards artists that would like to build their own games. In this series, we'll focus on the rigging and animation process of the hero character. We'll learn how to approach building skeletons and control systems. We'll also cover skinning techniques for polished deformations. Once the rig is finished, we'll then jump into animation and learn how to create appealing performances with time-saving techniques that really work. By the end of this training, you'll have the understanding you need to rigging and animate your own hero models.
Table of contents
- Setting up the Scene and Adding Leg Joints 7m
- Quickly Modifying a Joint's Orientation 7m
- Finishing Our Leg Chain and Mirroring It to the Opposite Leg 8m
- Organizing Our Scene and Creating Joints for the Root and Center-of-gravity 7m
- Working with the Insert Joint Tool 6m
- Creating a Pelvis Bone 2m
- Setting up Joints for the Helmet and Visor 3m
- Starting on the Character's Arm Chain 6m
- Using MEL to Reorient Joints 8m
- Adding Finger Bones 4m
- Creating a Joint Chain for the Thumb and Mirroring the Arm Chain 6m
- Skinning the Helmet 4m
- Skinning the Belt 3m
- Skinning the Hero's Boots 8m
- Mirroring Weights on Separate Pieces of Geometry 3m
- Binding the Character's Tunic 2m
- Binding the Gloves 7m
- Creating a Global Control 6m
- Designing Leg Controls 6m
- Adding Inverse Kinematics to the Legs 5m
- Setting up a Foot Roll System 6m
- Constraining the Feet to Our Intermediate Controllers 4m
- Creating Secondary Foot Controls 6m
- Finishing Our Foot Controls 8m
- Controlling the Torso 6m
- Setting up a Control for the Character's Center-of-gravity 3m
- Completing the Setup Process of the Hero's Upper Body 4m
- Creating Controls for the Neck, Helmet, and Visor 8m
- Setting up Controls for the Arms 7m
- Starting on the Hero's Finger Controls 6m
- Mirroring and Cleaning up Our Finger Controls 7m
- Finishing the Setup Process of Our Finger Controls 6m
- Double-checking Our Rig and Exploring Other Helpful MEL Tools 9m
- Setting up Our Scene for Animation 8m
- Reversing and Baking a Cycled Animation 8m
- More Techniques Used on Ghost Knight's Death Sequence and the Exporting Process 8m
About the author
Delano works avidly as an animation author at Pluralsight. Starting his career at animation studios like Shilo, Delano has developed a strong passion for his talents. His animation and rigging background help him teach and create some of the most-watched training on Pluralsight. A few of his favorite projects that he has contributed to include: Character Interaction in Maya and in Softimage, Rigging the Human Face in Maya, Rigging Sea Creatures in Maya, and Rigging and Animating Transforming... more