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The idea of this method is to keep the HIK animation retargeting far away from your rig so it doesn't break it, while allowing you to cherry pick what gets transferred. All you have to do is decide what nodes on your rig will receive keys. As long as you're careful with that, nothing breaks regardless of how you set up your rig. I'll be making a UI for this in the near future to make it easier to manage, but for now the core functionality is there. You can at least find everything you setup in the outliner if you make it show non-dag nodes and search for "Instructions".

@@LuisAlonsoTechArtist Tx! So I got it working with my personal MVP rig and -- after some experimentation -- I got it working like in the video. Question: when baked, the controls on my rig have all the keyframes -- that is correct, right? Now it would be a question of putting those controls on animation layers and then making adjustment in those layers, correct?

Thanks for the shortcut! Normally I have my nodes automatically pinned (there's an option for that) but I try to keep Maya with default options for these videos (which is starting to seem like it's painful to watch I think). The only non-default option I've kept is not displaying the hierarchy on selection, but I have some videos that go over that at least. If there's anyone still having trouble finding an input, know that you can also right click any node and "show all attributes". Maybe I should go over the custom node settings in a future video?

@@LuisAlonsoTechArtist Yeahhh I think it will be really helpful, especially for those who are unfamiliar with node editor...

I'll try to keep it on-screen then.

When doing game development solo, you cut corners where you can. Most characters in Space Boat barely have a rig. It's a good example of not needing an IK/FK blend rig because I can just use whatever works for the shot and move on to something else quickly.

@@LuisAlonsoTechArtist Better get devin!

Thanks! Good eye catching that! Can you tell that I don't like using splines for visual controls? I much prefer using baconShapeBones so it's parametric and comes with many features like wire thickness and xRay.

I hope to have some additional videos up soon that might help with your final film. Next up: UE5 and Eyes. I'll cover how to set up UV controlled eyes as well in that.

Thanks Orcosaurus. I think Crum would have benefitted from this videos a few months ago. Better late than never I guess.

If you're an animator or a modeler that wants to see their model move, I would say that any auto-rigger is fine once you have learned the basics and have an understanding of what that auto-rigger is doing even if it's not your primary purpose. When you start using the auto-rigger without that, you start to create limitations because your character design might not fit the auto-rigger's design. Learning how to rig from scratch and understanding the fundamental building blocks of rigging means if anything needs to be adapted (because no auto-rigger will work for everything) or get fixed (because no auto-rigger is without issues), you can then at least begin to approach the problem. Any automated process that takes away any understanding makes you vulnerable to a full halt in your production and sometimes leads to abandoning your project or having to slowly change it to something else to make it fit. I created this course to empower animators and modelers because rigging doesn't have to be difficult. As a side note: I've met animators that have made a career in animation that still don't understand how gimbal rotation works and they use it every day. When things go wrong, they get the "nerds" to write them a button that fixes the issue. These people are setting themselves up to be replaced by less expensive people that will press the same button. Protect yourself. One more thing: The auto-rigger that comes with Maya is something I would avoid altogether. Very little is gained from using it. If you're a modeler that just wants to see the character move, you're better off using HumanIK where you can at least transfer animation/mocap easily.

You're very welcome! Thanks for the kind words, it means a lot to me. Hopefully rigging is less scary now and more enjoyable!

Thank you so much! I hope this helps demystify rigging a little. Please have a look at rigonomicon.com where I have made it convenient for anyone to follow in a logical order.

It's always fun to break these $4k softwares.

True, a straight tutorial on a topic like this is always useful.

@@AgarthaTrapdoor There's a lot of videos out there that have misinformation on a number of these subjects. Hopefully I can improve the situation with these short videos that "show the work".

In that particular software package I can switch the rotation gizmo display from a gizmo ball to rotation axes (like it was 20 years ago). The rotation gizmo ball is a "new" interpretation of each rotation axis that brought the ability to rotate more than one axis at a time but it stripped away some useful stuff from the axis display. You can do this experiment with a gizmo ball but you need to visualize it differently. First imagine a rotation axis as a cupcake with one candle that is on top of a circular plate. The gizmo ball displays this as the circular plate whereas the axis direction is in fact the candle. An additional problem with gizmo balls is that you have no idea what the positive or negative direction is, meanwhile I can tell you right away how the values will change when I have the axes displayed. You need to imagine the candle (or place visual helpers) when you rotate the circles. The software you are using surely has a way to display the local axis (and it should skew when you gimbal lock). What software are you using?