Finalize and Clean Up - Game Character Development with Maya - page 923

2. Enable all the options. Click on Optimize, and the scene will quickly be optimized.
3. You no longer need the image planes, so remove them next, by going to Edit > De-
lete All by Type > Image Planes.
4. Look at the Layer Editor. There are no longer any image planes in the scene, so de-
lete the ImagePlanes layer by right-clicking it and selecting Delete.
5. Because the visibility of the layers is now controlled with the LOD group, there
isn't much point in having separate layers for each of Kila's LODs. Delete all but
the first layer and rename this to Kila. (For Grae, remember that he has one more
LOD than Kila.)
6. Use the Outliner to select the KilaLOD group. Place it in the Kila layer, setting it
to Reference when you're done so that nobody can select the character mesh.
7. If two characters were in the same scene, their skeleton layers might be easily con-
fused. To avoid this, rename the Kila layer to Kila_BaseSkel. (Create a similar lay-
er name for Grae.) Turn off its visibility and set its display type to Reference.
The scenes are now clean and tidy, with nothing remaining that is not relevant to the char-
acter or their rigs.
Tip
If you want the scene to be completely clean, leaving just the objects
needed, you can use File > Save Selected. Simply select the objects you
wish to keep and save them out into a separate file. This will strip out any-
thing not required by the scene.
Make Your Rig Idiot-Proof
The base skeleton and character meshes are now locked by the Layer Editor, meaning no
one can edit them by mistake. The rig, however, still needs some protection.
In its present state, the rig can easily be broken. Almost all of the controls can be moved
awayfromtherig,buttheyneedtostaylockedtoit.Anotherconcernisthatyouwantonly
the rotations to be available to the animator; as it is, however, the translations and even the
scale attributes are freely available to edit. All of this can have disastrous results.
In this section we will look into locking off all the attributes we don't want anyone to use,
with the help of the Channel Control window. This tool allows us to make attributes non-
keyable, meaning the animator cannot place keyframes on them. The animator can still
moveanobjectusingthemanipulators,butwecanlockthespecificattributesthatwedon't
want to be editable.