Original subtitles

- [Instructor] Let's have a quick overview

of the squirrel rig.

When opening the Blender file,

you will find two object,

our squirrel Armature and the squirrel object

that is using an Armature modifier.

The object is called a squirrel.

And it has as all material.

By default, you should have the Text Editor opened

with this squirrel rig UI text file opened.

When my rig is selected and in pause mode

if I press the play button, it will execute the script

and generate a little UI that will allow us

to hide or display the bones of our character.

The script doesn't run automatically,

you will have to run it

each time you will open your blender file.

What if your script is not open

because you don't have the Text Editor opened?

you just go to the editors panels,

select the Text Editor and in the Library

you will select the squirrel rig UI

and then just press the Play button.

You can then close this editor area.

The rig is pretty straightforward.

The root bone allow us to move the entire character,

the dorsal roots allow us to move the whole body

and give it its orientation.

But the legs won't follow.

You will find a chest and a hip controller

that can be moved, rotated and scape.

The neck and head can also be controlled

by one single bone that will behave the same

as the chest and hips bone.

You can then find some tweaker bone that will allow us

to only rotate the neck or only rotate the head.

Smaller controller bones are also available

to be able to squash and stretch the head.

Move the ears at will,

close the eyes or move the tip of the nose.

All the bone transform channels are already locked

when they are not to be used

making our keying set step a little faster.

(whoosh)

The legs are using inverse kinematic controllers,

meaning that we are controlling the whole arm or leg

by simply moving the end of the foot of our character.

While the motion should come from the shoulder,

then the arm, then the forearm to the end

it's inversed.

The arm controller is just here to be able

to give an orientation to the elbow.

On the back leg,

we will also find an inverse kinematic

from the foot controller,

but the heel and knee orientation

will be using a pole target.

It's a bone that can move freely in space

and the knee or heel of our character

will be pointing at it.

The tail use a simple forward kinematic bone chain.

So it basically rotates

or is being controlled from its root to its tip.

We will then find a lot of secondary controllers

that will allow us to move each joint of the character.

They will mainly be used to fix some deformation

or to add subtle motion to the character.

The rig also comes with some custom property

that we can access by using these bones.

When the bone is selected

we can find those custom properties in the item panel.

Those properties will allow us

to hide the legs of the character

or the tail of the character.

This will be really useful to isolate the body

and clearly read it's motion.

The tail follow option allow us

to whether isolate on not the rotation of the tail.

By default, the tail of our character

is following the rotation of the hips

and is aligned with it.

But if we select the property boon

and set this tail follow to zero,

the tail is not rotating with the hips anymore.

This will make our life way easier

when it comes to animating the tail.

So before we jump into animation,

I will just create the keying set for our character

by inserting a key frame on the channels

that are going to be used

and remove those that are locked.

Nothing really interesting here.

So I will switch to a time-lapse till the end of this video.

(whoosh)

(slow piano music)