Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
3.
This will be the main controller, so make the display handle visible. It should re-
tain the position of the joint from which it was duplicated, so you don't need to re-
position it.
At present, the control wrist inherits its rotations from the elbow and shoulder joints, so
we don't have complete control over it. Forcing it to follow the rotation on this new joint,
which has no influences, will free up the control wrist's movement and allow us to pose it
freely.
4.
Select L_ConHand followed by L_ConWrist, and go to Constrain > Orient; your
previous options should have been stored.
5.
Select L_ConWrist followed by L_ConHand, and go to Constrain > Point to lock
the new wrist control's translations to the old wrist controller.
The wrist is now free from the forearm, so go ahead and apply this to the right arm. Then
add the same controls to Grae.
Finger Controls
Animating the hands can be a time-consuming job, so we want a way around having to ro-
tate each joint separately before setting a key. What we will do next is add controls to the
fingers, allowing us to pose them quickly and easily. In this section you'll see how to use
time-saving dynamic attributes, mentioned earlier in this chapter.
Note
The next two sections cover advanced character-rigging tasks. You may
find that you don't need to animate the hands on your character, or the an-
imators on your team may prefer to animate the joints directly. Feel free to
skip this entire section on finger controls if you don't need it.
Adding Quick Poses
Using the new hand-control joint we created in the preceding section, we can add extra
dy-
namic attributes
that, once configured, will automatically pose the hand.
Attributes are built into every object. Up to now you have used the primary Translate,
Rotate, and Scale attributes, which control an object's movement, orientation, and scale.
You know that changing the value of an attribute has an effect on the object. In addition to
these default attributes, user-added dynamic attributes can control a number of character-
istics on an object, or even on a completely different object.
Let's now add some dynamic attributes to Kila's control hand joints.
