16.0

72 Character Tools
2. General Information
First, we will explain a few basics about character rigging in CINEMA 4D. CINEMA 4D works with a Joint
system. Simply put, this system lets you assign joints and appropriate locations that will in turn be linked to
the mesh and used to rotate and move your character. The mesh will follow the joints to which it is linked and
the character can be animated. To be able to correctly move your character a rig consisting of controllers
must be set up that serve as handles for the animator. This way not every individual joint of an arm must be
moved in order to position the hand at the desired location - only a single controller has to be moved. There
are additional character controllers and helpers for character animation. A few of them are explained below.
The Morph tag lets you create various facial expressions for your characters and morph between them.
Your polygon object acts as the reference and a base morph (starting position for all following morphs) and
target morph are created in the Pose Morph tag. You select the morph target in the Morph tag and change
the mesh...finished!
You create another morph target for each additional pose and model the poses one after the other. All the
expressions are stored in a single tag. Also, when using the Pose Morph tool, there’s no need to worry if you
have to make changes to the mesh after creating the poses. The poses will still work! Suppose you’ve created
all the poses for your character, but decide it would look much better with a second nose. The Pose Morph tool
will still happily morph between the poses.
Vamp gives you the possibility to transfer data from object to another, including selection information, Texture
tags, vertex maps and UVs. You can even transfer facial poses from one character to another!
Visual Selector is a great help with day-to-day animation. You load a render of your character into Visual
Selector‘s background (or use Visual Selector‘s default character picture) and place your character‘s
controllers onto the picture in the appropriate places. Visual Selector removes the need to keep looking for
your character‘s controls in the Object hierarchy. Everything is now represented visually and you can, for
example, select the foot controller by clicking on it directly in the picture. You want to move the eyes? No
problem. Click on the controller for the eyes directly in the picture.
You‘ll find the CINEMA 4D character animation tools in the main menu under Character.
Since character animation is a complex subject matter, the following overview may help if you’re new to the
process of rigging characters.
As with a real human, your character needs a skeleton of bones (or in our case, joints) in order to be able to
move around in the world. You place the joints inside the character’s mesh. The joints are linked to the mesh
via a Weight tag and Skin deformer so that each joint knows which part of the geometry to affect.