19.0

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 anima-
ted. 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 poly-
gon 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 expressi-
ons 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.
You can weight joints by selecting them and painting directly onto the mesh using the Weight tool. While the Weight
tool is active, the mesh is displayed black and the currently painted weighting is shown in white. The joint now knows
it should affect the white painted parts of the mesh only. In the active Weight tool mode, weighting is shown for the
selected joints. Each joint has its own weighting.