# 3D rigging In digital 3D, Rigging is the process of adding a structure of bones and joints to a modeled mesh to make it easier to pose and animate. It is like giving a skeleton to your character model, although any object or prop can be rigged to make animation easier. For humanoid-shaped characters, you can use Maya’s built-in [[quick-rig]] to quickly attach a pre-made skeleton. For this demo, I am using a dumpy little snowman I threw together. There’s not a lot of pieces to rig, I just want to be able to make him bounce around and turn his head a little bit. This is a nice setup to walk you through the process. ![[Pasted image 20230213103348.png]] ## add joints and bones The first step of the process is to add joints and connecting bones to your mesh. You build the elements of the skeleton directly inside the mesh. Some quick setup stuff… - use the 4-Up views to precisely position the elements, try to avoid using the perspective view because that can mess up positioning - set your panel **Shading** to **X-Ray + Joints** so you can see what you are doing - set your **Menu Set** to **Rigging** and choose the **Rigging** tab ![[Pasted image 20230213103132.png]] Choose the second icon over that looks like an arm bending at the elbow. This lets you add in joints and connects them as you go along. I started by placing a joint in the middle of the belly of my snowman and then proceeded to add a neck and a head joint. I made sure these were placed in the center of the cylinder that makes up the snowman. ![[Pasted image 20230213104024.png]] I’ve renamed the joints to their location in the body in the Outliner. You will notice that a Joint Chain has been created with the belly as the primary joint with neck and head connected. ![[Pasted image 20230213104129.png]] When I move the belly joint, all the others move with it. When I move the neck, the head will move with it. At the end of the line, I can move the head on its own. The belly joint is called the Root Joint because everything grows from there. We also call this a Parent/Child relationship. The belly is the parent with the neck as a child. Similarly, the neck is a parent to the head child. More complex skeletons can easily be created. You can add and remove joints from a chain. You can copy and mirror joint chains too. This makes it easy to create a skeleton for an arm or leg and then copy/mirror for the corresponding arm/leg on the other side of the body. When you are done, clear out settings by going to **Modify > Freeze Transformations**. --- ## joint orientation Joints can be moved and rotated to get the different body parts to move and rotate. Unfortunately, when you start creating joints, those joint balls can start pointing in weird directions. To see where all the joints are pointing, select all the joints in the Outliner and choose **Display > Transform Display > Local Rotation Axes**. You should now see little XYZ displays on each of the joints. ![[Pasted image 20230213111315.png]] You can adjust your joints manually, but for now let’s do it automatically. Go to **Skeleton > Orient Joint > ![[4f8ad8d0fcab77d05e25900bddfb6559_MD5.png]]** and make sure **Orient children of selected joints** is selected. This will make sure each parent is oriented toward their child. ![[Pasted image 20230213111009.png]] --- ## adding kinematics stuff here. ## bind the mesh to the skeleton Once you have a skeleton system built and overlaid on your mesh, you need to connect the two together. Choose all your joints and the mesh in the Outliner. While there are options to fine-tune the binding, the quickest way to do this with default settings is to go to pull-downs for **Skin > Bind Skin**. Congrats, your mesh now has a skeleton applied. Try choosing individual joints and then moving, rotating, or even scaling them to pose your character. Try it out and see how it goes. Pretty cool, huh? --- ## paint in weights Chances are, the mesh deforms in ways that don’t look quite right. Portions are going to bunch or twist in odd ways. Thankfully, you can fix that problem by painting in areas of influence to control what portions of the mesh are affected by each joint. Select your mesh object and use the pull-down menus for **Skin > Paint Skin Weights  > ![[4f8ad8d0fcab77d05e25900bddfb6559_MD5.png]]**. ![[Pasted image 20230213113333.png]] In the pop-up box, you will see the different joints that bound to your mesh. Each joint will have different areas of influence that are shown in white on your model. You can use a paintbrush to paint in or paint out areas of influence. Set Mode to Paint. Set the Weight Type to Skin Weight. Grab a brush and start painting. As always, normal clicks add paint. CTRL-clicks remove paint, SHIFT-clicks smooth out the paint. There is also a dedicated Smooth brush to smooth out your work without a special key combo. Work through a joint at a time and paint in what portions of the mesh get affected. Don’t forget to move around your model and paint the back side too. --- Learn more… - [What is Rigging? from Concept Art Empire](https://conceptartempire.com/what-is-rigging/) - [Rigging in Maya from Ravi Khatri](https://www.educba.com/rigging-in-maya/) - [Building Skeletons from Autodesk Support and Learning](https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2023/ENU/?guid=GUID-360A07B4-9C74-4996-92EC-3BF4E9045DA3) - [Autodesk Maya Skeleton from Styly Magazine](https://styly.cc/tips/maya-skelton-setup/) - [Skeleton and Joint Orientation Axis. Rigging from DIGA Hub](https://youtu.be/eqJn229nj2I) Free rigs… - [Ultimate Rigs from Ugur Ulvi Yetskin](https://www.behance.net/gallery/17774421/Ultimate-Rigs-for-Free) - [Free Maya Rigs on ConceptArtEmpire](https://conceptartempire.com/free-maya-rigs/) --- tags: #3d #maya #resources home: [[! 3d modeling- maya]]