WEBVTT 00:00.180 --> 00:05.880 In this lesson, we're going to begin to learn how to animate a character and this is kind of the next 00:05.880 --> 00:12.780 step in the evolution of learning animation, going from simple shapes and very limited range of motion 00:13.080 --> 00:17.890 to a fully articulated character with limbs and spine and head. 00:18.330 --> 00:22.640 So before we do that, I want to teach you what referencing is and why that's important. 00:23.040 --> 00:26.940 Right now we have this Bones Rigzin open. 00:27.360 --> 00:30.000 So and we've done this with the robot righ. 00:30.000 --> 00:30.240 Right. 00:30.240 --> 00:33.240 We were just using it in the scene and we're animating it. 00:33.270 --> 00:38.310 Well, there's something called referencing, and that's important because what that means is we can 00:38.310 --> 00:41.100 reference a rig in to a new scene. 00:41.610 --> 00:45.420 And that way we're not actually affecting the rig itself. 00:45.420 --> 00:50.910 So let's say we're in production or we're going to do more than one shot or more than one scene. 00:51.300 --> 00:54.150 And all of a sudden we have a model update. 00:55.350 --> 01:00.870 You would have to go through every single shot and update them individually, and that is just totally 01:00.870 --> 01:01.560 impractical. 01:01.590 --> 01:08.760 So what you do is, is you actually just referencing one rig file into each of your scenes that you 01:08.760 --> 01:09.750 are using it in. 01:10.020 --> 01:13.380 And then if you need to make a change, you just edit that reference file. 01:13.440 --> 01:15.630 So we're actually in the reference file right now. 01:15.840 --> 01:23.220 So let's go to a new scene, go file new and to reference a rig, we'll just go file. 01:24.240 --> 01:31.050 Create reference and we can just choose the bones rig and click reference. 01:31.710 --> 01:37.350 Also also have a few options over here and so it'll choose a namespace for it. 01:37.350 --> 01:41.820 And it's probably going to go based off of the scene. 01:41.820 --> 01:43.690 You selected namespace as parent. 01:44.850 --> 01:46.380 Basically, it's the file name, right? 01:46.380 --> 01:51.120 So it's going to say Bones rig and then it's going to have a colon and then say all this other stuff 01:51.270 --> 01:51.830 after it. 01:52.380 --> 01:58.710 This isn't super important to know now, but just know there there's a way that Maya tries to keep track 01:58.710 --> 02:03.480 of reference things and that's what the name Space's so I'll reference. 02:03.930 --> 02:07.410 And now you can see we have this kind of new little icon here. 02:07.680 --> 02:11.280 It looks like the groups like we had before, but there's a little blue dot here. 02:12.240 --> 02:13.380 I don't know if you can see that. 02:13.710 --> 02:17.220 And you can also see the name spaces here. 02:17.760 --> 02:21.570 So you can always tell a namespace by the fact that there's a colon in it. 02:21.960 --> 02:27.510 And so it says Bones, Regg, Colon, Harig and Bones or colon bones Regg. 02:27.720 --> 02:33.900 And I'll do that for every asset, every node group and joint and everything. 02:34.920 --> 02:38.240 So that's my way of keeping track of of reference regs. 02:39.510 --> 02:41.970 Someone sits on the keyboard to turn on the texture's. 02:42.390 --> 02:48.390 So this scene doesn't really look that much different from the one we were in earlier that said Bones. 02:48.390 --> 02:53.850 Regg, other than the fact that now we have this reference object and it's a new scene, but the power 02:53.850 --> 02:58.770 of this can be demonstrated by making changes to the original reference. 02:58.770 --> 03:05.910 So let's save this and I'll say I'll just say test for now and we'll save that. 03:06.510 --> 03:14.160 And we could open up this scene here and we can make changes to this. 03:14.640 --> 03:18.120 And then when we save this file, just say we want to make the head bigger. 03:18.660 --> 03:25.740 If we save this file and then open up the one that this rig is referenced into, this change will happen 03:25.740 --> 03:26.570 in that other scene. 03:27.180 --> 03:29.250 So I've already done this in another scene. 03:29.250 --> 03:35.430 I don't want to mess up our nice bones scene file some opening back up the tests that we have been doing. 03:39.980 --> 03:44.330 And again, if we had made that change in that reference file, we would see a big head here now. 03:44.630 --> 03:49.850 But because I want to mess up that original file, I'm just going to replace the reference here with 03:49.850 --> 03:52.580 one I did use it with so we can go to the reference editor. 03:52.850 --> 03:55.530 And that's basically an outliner for reference. 03:55.530 --> 04:00.220 Trigg's, I'm going to click this and I'm going to choose a new path here. 04:00.920 --> 04:04.540 And we know it is called bighead here. 04:04.550 --> 04:07.880 If I go down here, underscore bighead so I can just type that in. 04:08.130 --> 04:09.740 Enter right here. 04:09.750 --> 04:13.090 This is telling you where it's referencing the file. 04:13.130 --> 04:17.420 So you just type in that new one and reload or just it'll reload. 04:17.430 --> 04:18.710 So now you can see it has a big head. 04:19.280 --> 04:22.880 So we didn't actually affect this in this scene. 04:22.910 --> 04:23.330 We did it. 04:23.330 --> 04:29.660 Another scene that's referencing and again, the power is imagine you had, you know, a short film 04:29.660 --> 04:35.120 or something and you had 50 shots and you made a decision halfway through. 04:35.120 --> 04:35.660 You know what? 04:35.660 --> 04:38.990 I want something a little different about this model or or the rig. 04:38.990 --> 04:40.460 Usually it's the rig being updated. 04:40.460 --> 04:43.790 You'll start animating and realizing you don't have enough controls or something. 04:44.030 --> 04:50.090 And you can go back to the reference and update that model or the rig using what you've learned in the 04:50.090 --> 04:54.040 other parts of this course, and then you'll have it in your animation. 04:54.170 --> 04:59.290 So when we learn this walk cycle, we're going to use a reference rig just as a good practice. 04:59.290 --> 05:03.560 So I'll see the next lesson where we will begin working on a walk cycle. 05:03.740 --> 05:04.370 Thanks for watching.