- [Lindsey] Hi, I'm Lindsey Jones,
voice of Ruby on the animated show, RWBY.
Autodesk Maya is an important tool
in the creation of our show.
It's the primary software
used in many of our pipelines
including modeling, rigging, animating,
lighting, rendering, and visual effects.
Today, Rooster Teeth rigging
artist, Gio Coutinho,
will be showing us how she uses
Maya for character rigging.
- [Gio] Another feature
present on Ruby rigs
are sign deformers, which
help simulate a breeze effect.
If I go ahead and select
my breeze control,
I can enable the breeze
on different meshes,
and I can use the speed attribute
to create a subtle deformation,
which resembles a breeze.
If I go ahead and do the same on her cape,
you'll currently see that
it's not attached to her hood.
So I'm gonna go ahead and
walk you through the steps
for painting out blend shape weights.
What I have going on in the
background for this set up,
are sign deformers, which are affecting
a duplicate of this mesh that you see.
That mesh is hooking up into
the skin version of the cape.
And if I go ahead and
turn off the blend shape,
you'll see that it goes
back to it's bind pose.
Now a very useful feature of blend shapes
is that you can actually paint out
their influence on your meshes.
So I'm gonna go ahead
and select these verts.
I'm gonna right click this, go into paint,
blend shape, paint target weights.
And if I open up my tool settings,
you'll see that you can
paint out the influence
for your specific targets on this mesh.
Since I currently only have one target,
I'll be working on that.
I'll go ahead and set my value to zero,
and flood that influence.
And you'll see that right now,
these verts are now snapped
back to their original position.
And if I scrub through
the speed attribute,
they will stay in place.
So I'm just gonna go back
in, invert my vert selection,
and go back to by blend shape weights.
I'll just move that out a little bit
so that the transition between the area
that is pinned under the
hood is a little bit smoother
to the area that is not.
So if you look at it now, this is
working a little bit better,
and it actually makes sense.
I used the same technique on her skirt,
her hair, and her hood.
And even though it's
something pretty basic,
it can help you increase
the quality of your rigs
without adding a lot
more work to your plate.
