Setting up the wheels connected to the back
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  • In this tutorial we will begin rigging the wheels connected to the robot's back.
  • Maya
    Autodesk Maya
  • 6m 13s
In this lesson, we will begin rigging the wheels connected to the robot's back. All right. So we have our chest control in place. Everything's working just fine. It's oriented properly. Would also like to mention that I've taken care of the scale and visibility channels. Made sure that they were locked and hidden. All right. So the back wheels. They're going to be done the same way we've rigged the hips, only we do have these extra objects tied to the wheel at the very back, but that's no problem at all. We'll get those taken care of and we'll make sure that they're constrained to the wheel they're directly tied to. But before we get to that, let's create the base joints of our wheel rig. So we know how to do this already. We want to go in and grab our rim meshes. Then head over to Component mode, switch over to edge selection, and then once we grab or edge loop, we'll use C, J and T to create our joint. Great. Let's create one more joint to correct its orientation. So I'll grab the joint in the center-- let's switch over to Object mode. I'll show its local rotation axis. And now we grab the first joint over to the right. Grab the joint in the center. Let's use our joint tool to reorient the joint in the center. And we no longer need the extra joint, so we can remove that. And then set our reoriented joint to a radius of 5. All right. Let's create another joint for the next wheel. So we'll go in and do the same steps. Head over to Component mode. OK. So now we can create a joint. And instead of creating an extra joint and going through all of those steps, I mean, what we could always do is grab this joint we've already taken care of and snap it over to our new joint. So let's do that. Might be a bit faster to take care of it that way. So I'll take joint one, I'll duplicate it, kind of move it over. Now it's just a matter of grabbing the new joint we've just made, Joint 2, Shift-selecting the joint we've duplicated, and now we can use our Center Object tool to snap it in place. Now we no longer need the second joint, Joint 2, so we can go ahead and delete that. OK, great. So we'll go to shaded mode to take a look at things. All right. Let's create a root for these two. So duplicate this joint we've just set up. Let's switch our Move tool to Object mode and start to drag this down. May need to go to Wireframe mode, just to make sure we move this in the right spot. Where this point should pivot from, that's at the front of the connection piece. Let's make sure it's there. And now at that point, we can set the radius on this one to 7. We'll take joints A and B and let's parent it to the root. And now we can work on renaming these. All right, so we could always start with our root. That's going to be jntroot_backwheels01. I'll just copy the name. Rename the next joint to jnt_backwheela01. All right, and let's take care of the next joint-- paste-- and that's back wheel B. All right. So the next step is to constrain down our wheels, so let's use our Outliner for that. Grab one of the tires, hit the up arrow to grab the entire wheel group, then frame it up. Now it's just a matter of grabbing our joint and then the group, and then using our Object Offset tool. Let's set the size on this one to 60, as we've done before. We'll take care of the next group. It should be right above the one we've just constrained. There it is. Back B. All right, so I'll again grab the joint, grab the group, use our Object Offset tool. And taking a look at things, everything's looking good. Working out just fine. OK, great. So at this point, I'd say this would be a good time to stop the lesson. And we will just continue working on our back wheel rig in the next lesson. We'll work on getting that all wrapped up. Then at that point, we can address the objects at the very back, these rail pieces that need to also be connected.