Tag: mesh

With modo 601 came a video called Fireboy where Andy Brown rigs and animates one of Warner McGee's characters. The video is quite detailed, but if you just want to quickly jump in and rig a character, I've broken it down into simple steps below.

Preparation

• Make sure your character is a nice clean mesh without holes or flaws. Just to be sure, run > Geometry > Mesh Cleapup before you start.
• Separate the components, such as body and eyes into separate layers.
• Centre your character at X & Z, and zero on Y
 

Create Skeleton

• Click on the Setup tab along the top menu
• Under Commands select > Setup > Skeleton
• Then click on Tool Properties tab and make sure that Compensation and Intersection are turned on (2:20)
• In Add-mode, create your skeleton. Be mindful of when to use symmetry, and when to turn it off.


Align Bones

• Double-click on the root bone (in the viewport, or from the Item List)
• Adjust all joint locators so that the red line is pointing along the X-axis by selecting each joint individually, then clicking on the universal transform tool to move it. It's quicker if you have two viewports open side-by-side - one Front, and one Right to make seeing where you're at, easier. (5:55)

Zero out transforms on all joints (Sets a resting position for deformations)

• Go into Setup modo. A yellow border will apart around the viewport
• Double-click on the root bone
• Go to > Properties > Zero > All
• Turn off the Setup mode toggle
• Save
 

Bind skeleton to Mesh

• While in Item mode, select Setup mode
• Double-Click on the root bone in the viewport, and then Shift-select the character mesh
• Then under  > Commands > Deformers > Bind > Heat  (you can use any of the other options)

Ever needed a low-poly bird for a background, or wanted to sculpt an organic shape like an animal or human but didn't want to start totally from scratch? Did you know modo has them built-in? They're part of the Solid Sketch menu.

The Solid Sketch tool provides a quick method for “roughing” out organic shapes. By clicking down, new nodes are created and Solid Sketch connects these dots with a smooth flowing mesh. Each node can spawn new branches to create complex shapes quickly and easily.

When you click to create a node you can immediately drag to the right and left to scale the node. Once you have released the mouse button you can use the various handles to move, scale, rotate and twist the node. Additionally, holding the Shift key and dragging on the center handle will scale on all three axes. Clicking on a node with the middle-mouse button will delete that node.

Note: It seems for some reason that this functionality has been removed from MODO701.  

Go to > Geometry > Curve Palette > Presets