How To; Rigging a Ward - Warlock Ward - Part One

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In this section of the guide I'll be providing a breakdown of my workflow on rigging my most recent ward for Dota 2. This doesn't cover any of the steps in creating the ward itself but rather digging into the specifics on rigging a ward. So, lets get started.First you want to import the mesh into the scene, now if you didn't model it properally to scale originally then some scaling is in order. In this instance, the ward was a few times larger then default.In order to scale it right, Iin several other words. I find this yields the best results in finding a scale that works best in game. You can download the ward rigs provided in this guide to do the same.Once you find a scale that works best for your ward, you want to freeze the channels. To do this, you highlight the channels you want to freeze, in this case, all of them,, and in the drop down menu, highlight, and select. What this does is resort the mesh to a new default state, scaled properly for the game.To be extra safe you also want to delete the history of the ward. In the menu at the top, select, highlightand selectin the list. This will remove all previous changes on the ward giving you a clean mesh to work with.If you did this right, you should look at your channel box, see all the channels at zero (0), with no input listed. Now we move onto placing bones.There are two buttons you can select to place bones, you can either selectfrom thedrop down menu, or in the animation shelf that comes by default in Maya 2015, select the joint icon which I have highlighted in the image above. I also recommend placing bones using orthographic views as it tends to yeild more precise results.You only budget of 52 bones and I highly recommend using as many of those as possible as the more bones you place in the ward, the more animation potential your ward can have. Although, most wards won't need all 52 to reach it's maximum potential.Bone placement varies from ward to ward, so I wont get to much into the specifics here. Experiment and find what works best for your ward.Also don't forget to name your bones, I feel this should be a given, but I'll make sure to mention it anyway. This will only help skinning the ward later on much easier.Once the bones are laid out I move onto the controls, however these controls change from ward to ward, so I won't get into the specifics on how to go about this.I use a set of animation tools and scripts that go by the name. These tools are highly useful and I recommend downloading these regardless if you work on dota 2 content or not. On top of all the helpful scripts, they also provide pre-built controls which I tend to use on many of my rigs.You can download them here Or, you can go to their website directly, here I won't go into the details on how to install them, they come with a read me which is more then needed to get them working.You might also want to add some IK systems to your bones, to do this, from thedrop down menu select, you can alternative select theicon from the animation shelf as shown in the image above. You use the tool by selecting the bone you want to control as your main first, and follow it up by selecting the final bone in the chain that you want to be influenced by the IK.Once you do this you will have a basic IK chain on your rig.To get some more control on your IK, you might want to change it from ato a. This will allow you to attach a pole vector to the IK which allows you to control the direction the IK is in. You can make this change in thein theOnce you make the change you will notice the IK chain 'break', this is ok, this is simply the result of not having a pole vector to attach to. So, make some pole vector controls. What I normally do is select the middle joint in the chain, snap the control to that joint and pull outward from that joint to a position that works. Once you have them, select the control, then the IK control you want it to influence and from thedrop down, select. You might have to make some subtle adjustments.Once you do this, the bones will snap back into place. While I haven't covered the skinning yet, this will demostrate how the IKs are effecting the ward once it's completed.Once all of that is situated, I test all the controls to make sure they are influencing the bones the way I intend, if everything looks good, it's time for skinning.To skin the ward you will want to select both the mesh and the root bone. Then from thedrop down menu, select. This will automatically skin the mesh to the bones. It's also NEVER good to just leave it at that, you will have to make adjustments.As you can see, this is the results of simply smooth binding the mesh to the bones. Close, but no cigar.To edit the weights you will want to open the Paint Skin Weights Tool. To do this, from thedrop down, selectfrom the menu.This will open up a menu like the one on the left side of the image above. I also recommend turning on the Color Ramp in the red box in the same image above. This works a lot better than the default black and white since it helps find areas of very low influence by making them blue. Here is a little tip when it comes to flooding in large areas of the mesh. In this case the eyeball was attached to the base mesh. And as you can see I started painting the eyeball, however this is not very efficient. Right click the mesh and select face. Once you do this select the faces you want to isolate, double clicking selects the entire individual mesh. In this instance I double clicked the eye to select all the entire eye mesh. Then click the isolate button that I've highlighted in the image above. Once you do this you would have successfully isolated the selected mesh.