Creation 11

Weight painting, Controllers and Action Constraints

Here you can see continuing weight painting and adding more bones to the fingers. These are controller bones which are associated with hand constraints....

Notes:

• Open animation interface.
• Grab all hand bones (Finger tips) (Action editor).
• Frame 1 - add new Action name it; HandCurl.
• I = Insert key frame LocRotScale.
• Turn on automatic key frame (red circle button).
• Frame 2 - Rotate finger tip (Transform Orientation: Normal Rotate manipulator mode).
• Ctrl + Alt + U = User preferences, turn off 'continuous grab" so you don't accidently grab the gimble (manipulator tool).
• Position the hand in a grasping/fist position.
• Select frame 1 key frames, duplicate and put in frame 3.
• Frame 4 opposite hand position (slight backwards bends on fingers), this is an extreme pose and can be used if your character presses his hand against something.
• Can click and drag key frames.
• So you want pose 1 and 3 to be normal, 2 to be grasp and 4 to be extreme pose, this is so each pose can go from normal to that pose.
• Now turn automatic key frame off, this is important so other actions or key frames are not created accidentally while doing other things, which I did quite a few times, resulting in me having quite a few empty actions.
• Now close (cross button next to action name) the action you are working on, don't worry it doesn't delete it, it just closes it, I actually don't know how to delete actions.
• To go back to normal can clear movement and rotations, (Alt + R, Alt + G).
• Back to default view now, views are personal preference, and you can make your own layout, but I used animation view for animation and default view for everything else.
• Go into edit mode. Make sure fingers are perfectly straight. Now make the finger controllers by selecting the start bone of each finger and scaling it down then extending it to the end of the finger tip. Name it. Controller (Fing_Index_C.L).
• Do this for all fingers, including thumbs.
• I had x-axis mirror turned on so this was all duplicated in right hand to, will have to re-name them though and do all the constraints separately next.