Creating joints and joint chains

Transcript

00:03

There are a number of ways to create joints. In Maya.

00:07

First, we can use the main menus.

00:10

We need to make sure the menu set is set to rigging. So we can see the skeleton menu.

00:16

Now, we can see it. We simply move down to create joints and open the options,

00:22

just reset this. So it's back to the default settings.

00:26

So here we have the main options associated with creating joints and joint chains.

00:32

You'll notice that the mouse pointer has now changed to a

00:35

cross hair which indicates we are in joint creation mode.

00:40

What I like to do is snap the joints to the grid just to keep things neat and tidy

00:45

to do this. I can simply hold down X

00:48

which will activate grid snapping.

00:51

You can also see the button being activated up here.

00:55

What I can do now is click anywhere

00:58

and the joint will snap to the closest grid point

01:01

I can then click over here and create a second joint

01:05

and then a third

01:07

to complete the joint chain.

01:08

I just press enter and then we drop out of joint creation mode.

01:13

Here we have a simple joint chain with each

01:16

joint being automatically parented to the one before it,

01:20

you can see the hierarchy in the outliner.

01:24

So that is one way to create joints.

01:28

The next is to use the rigging shelf.

01:33

The create joint button is here

01:36

and to open the options, we simply double click it.

01:39

You can also see the last used tool is shown here for quick access

01:45

and we can create joints just as before.

01:52

Finally, you can hold down space to access the skeleton menu through the hot box.

Video transcript