What is rigging? Rigging is building controls to manipulate objects. Why would we need rigging? The character needs to be able to move around. Rigging can be as basic as squishing a jello-like cube into something similar to a fat pancake.
What is parenting? Parenting is a way of having one object fully controlled by another object. With parenting, we essentially create a parent-child relationship between our objects. This means that the child will always follow it's parent. Unless it is a stubborn and/or rebellious child. Then we might have a problem. To do this 'parenting' thing, you select the object that you want to be the child, then shift-select the object that has been deemed the previously mentioned object's parent. Then you press the 'P' key, which is Maya's hotkey to parent. If you select the parent of the two objects, you can control both but you still have complete control over the child by simply selecting the child object.
'Z' is Maya's hotkey to undo something. :3
Head over to Window then Outliner to view the hierarchy of the objects. The little plus signs (+) mean that there is something that has been parented to that object. And now for un-parenting! Mwuahahaha. All you have to do is select the object that you want to un-parent (that sounds cruel), and then hit Shift-'P' and viola, you now have an orphan object.
We want the forearm to pivot from the elbow, not the center of the forearm. Arms just don't work like that.
The 'W' is Maya's hotkey for the Move tool, and the 'E' and 'R' keys are hotkeys for the Rotate and Scale tools, respectively. The '4' key makes things clearer, turning the object from shaded grey mode to wireframe "there-are-too-many-lines-now-so-it's-a-good-time-to-panic" mode.
The whole knowing how to change the pivot point is really actually pretty basic...but it's also really very important in the rigging business of things.
To center a pivot point, all you have to do is click on the Modify tab and go down to Center Pivot. Simple enough.
According to...Delano...hm...the best way to put the pivot where you want it is doing so by hand via an extremely complex computer program. So basically you just hold down the Insert key...which unfortunately the Mac keyboard does NOT have...soooooo I'm sorry I don't really know what the Insert key on the Mac keyboard is. :[ Anyways, all you have to do is allegedly hold down this mysterious Insert key, and then move the pivot in the x- and z-axis. To confirm this, you have to hit the Insert key again. Of course, the best view to do so in would be the top view, which you can attain by hitting the 'space' (the final frontier) bar and then choosing the view that says TOP on it.
The '5' key switches from that panicky wireframe mode to the easy-on-the-eyes shaded mode.
Whew. That's a lot of notes. And I'm only 4 videos into this hour-long tutorial session! :3
Groups are great for organizing a multi-object scene, like an urban environment or a murder scene. Pressing Control-'G', or in my case Command-'G' (Maya's hotkey to - you guessed it - create a group), creates a group of whatever objects that you had selected. Groups help simplify our scene, making it less cluttered and a whole lot less panicky. Oh and it also grants a bit of clarity and quick access to things.
Now the best way to imagine how an arm joint would work would be to think of your own body. We can actually create an entire skeleton that is made up of Mayan joints and bones that can be placed inside of a modeled character so that the character can be used for animation purposes.
Okay folks well I'm gonna stop for now and pick back up afternoon. I'm on video tutorial number 6 of 11 video-lesson. :]
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