Digital Tutors - Indie Game Development Pipeline Volume 6 - Hero Character Rigging and Animation

Duration 3h 30m Level Beginner Project Files Included

Software used

Autodesk Maya LT

What you will 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.

1. Introduction and project overview 00:54

2. Setting up the scene and adding leg joints 06:41

3. Quickly modifying a joint's orientation 06:44

4. Finishing our leg chain and mirroring it to the opposite leg 07:34

5. Organizing our scene and creating joints for the root and center-of-gravity 07:24

6. Working with the insert joint tool 05:55

7. Creating a pelvis bone 02:08

8. Setting up joints for the helmet and visor 02:42

9. Starting on the character's arm chain 05:35

10. Using MEL to reorient joints 07:47

11. Adding finger bones 04:24

12. Creating a joint chain for the thumb and mirroring the arm chain 06:13

13. Skinning the helmet 03:59

14. Skinning the belt 03:04

15. Skinning the hero's boots 07:46

16. Mirroring weights on separate pieces of geometry 03:24

17. Binding the character's tunic 02:27

18. Binding the gloves 06:52

19. Creating a global control 05:30

20. Designing leg controls 06:18

21. Adding inverse kinematics to the legs 04:58

22. Setting up a foot roll system 05:49

23. Constraining the feet to our intermediate controllers 03:36

24. Creating secondary foot controls 06:02

25. Finishing our foot controls 07:35

26. Controlling the torso 05:46

27. Setting up a control for the character's center-of-gravity 02:33

28. Completing the setup process of the hero's upper body 03:42

29. Creating controls for the neck, helmet, and visor 07:49

30. Setting up controls for the arms 07:12

31. Starting on the hero's finger controls 05:54

32. Mirroring and cleaning up our finger controls 07:27

33. Finishing the setup process of our finger controls 06:14

34. Double-checking our rig and exploring other helpful MEL tools 08:47

35. Setting up our scene for animation 07:53

36. Reversing and baking a cycled animation 07:41

37. More techniques used on ghost knight's death sequence and the exporting process 07:56