Rigging a robot. How to exactly?

# 1 14-11-2016 , 05:20 PM

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Hi fellas. Im new to maya, well, not really "new" about the part of modelling and stuff, but really amateur in the part of skinning and rigging.

So, i want to make a robot to be used in unity3d. Not an android, a mechanical robot with humanoid form.

The problem is, i dont have a clue how to proceed when it comes to skinning. At the beginning, i thought that i could even avoid completely the skinning process keeping in mind it is just a robot and the arms, legs, etc are mechanical parts that will not move with the skin and need to be separated, for example, the movement of the leg comes from a rounded gear so i cant use skinning or it will look terribly bad. So, with just making the correct parent movements and placing some controlers here and there.. that should be it. But then i started to watch some videos, and i noticed that, even with robots, its highly recommended to do the skinning process.

So, my question is, is that right? how do i skin a robot? i mean, how can i make a skeleton that will not be attached to the "skin" of the robot , so i can move freely the rotating point of the arm, the head, or watever without deforming other parts of the body? im really confused at this point.

Thanks in advance.

Last edited by n3mes1s; 15-11-2016 at 02:25 PM.

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# 2 15-11-2016 , 11:57 AM

SM Tea Boy
Join Date: Apr 2002

Location: Prague

Posts: 3,228

You can skin it or not it's up to you good parenting to joints will also get it done, I do it both ways here

https://simplymaya.com/autodesk-maya-...02/?tut_id=380

Good luck
David

From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"

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# 3 15-11-2016 , 02:10 PM

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... thanks, but a bit of info should be nice, instead of giving me just a link to BUY a tutorial...

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# 4 15-11-2016 , 06:43 PM

SM Tea Boy
Join Date: Apr 2002

Location: Prague

Posts: 3,228

Here is a short video I made hopefully this helps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMjvGizyzl0

From a readers' Q and A column in TV GUIDE: "If we get involved in a nuclear war, would the electromagnetic pulses from exploding bombs damage my videotapes?"

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# 5 17-11-2016 , 03:53 AM

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Thanks, that is more or less the basic doubt i had, though i didnt get how you make all those selections (im still learning rigging and im not english native so i would probably need to watch the video several times..). Anyways right now im teaking a break because maya dont want to combine almost any mesh in my scene. It hangs out all the time. And i dont have a clue why and i lost my patience in 3 days trying to figure that out without success.

Anyway, thanks for the video! (at least now i know that skeleton can be also applied to humanoid robots). Sadly, as i said im not going to be able to put it on practice.

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# 6 04-01-2017 , 06:29 AM

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Join Date: Jan 2017

Posts: 13

No worries at all, people tend to get confused when they hear "skinning", don't think about actual skin at this point, think of "skinning" as the process of assigning which vertices you want maya to manipulate when a specific joint is being moved.

To blow your mind a bit more, I have had to use "skinning" for props, vehicles and even an environment! Its simply the fact of helping Maya understand which vertices you want a joint to be assigned to pretty much.

With that said, a robot huh? I highly recommend using joints and skinning it to the entire geometry. I wouldn't go about simply doing parent to child relationships, for the simple fact whenever you want to animate the legs it will be a huge hassle, since legs tend to use IK, which stands for "inverse kinematics", IK is used basically to only manipulate 1 single controller to move the leg, rather than animating the "thigh controller" and "knee controller" for example.

Where do you pace your joints for your character though since its a robot?? A pretty cool tip is this... the placements of your joints will depend on where you want a character to be deformed. For example lets say an arm, has a shoulder, elbow and wrist joint. You know where your elbow rotates from for example, you wouldn't want to place your characters elbow joint on his forearm, why? well because the deformation will look improper.

I see you are also worried by moving your elbow joint that you might be moving other joints you don't want like a leg joint for example. No need to worry at all about that! See, joints have parent to child relationships, each one has its own root joint, for example again.. an elbow's root joint is the shoulder. An ankle's root joint is the thigh. The head's root joint is the neck, and all of those root joints have a MAIN root joint which comes from the hip, the center of gravity. This is your main root joint in which once you move, all your joints follow since it is the parent.

Another thing to keep in mind, you will want controllers to manipulate your joints. Never ever send a rig to an animator expecting them to animate from the joints themselves, that is not proper studio pipeline procedure.

Feel free to check out my website! (:

https://dlopezdemedrano.com

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# 7 09-01-2017 , 02:21 PM

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Erm.. i already knew all that lol. My main concern wasnt really skinning or placing joints.. my main concern was to do the weights correctly assigning em to just single geometry pieces, because it is a robot (and classic skinning wont work for that reason). I didnt know how to do that (still i dunno, since things changed and im no longer for now working on it). And i didnt have any reference about any video or anything else where it tells how to specifically rig this kind of mechanical humanoids (because there are no video tutorials anywhere about it, not even in youtube LOL, amazing....). But of course, i have essential knowledge about skinning lol, there is no need to remind me what it is :s

Last edited by n3mes1s; 09-01-2017 at 02:23 PM.

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Rigging a robot. How to exactly?

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