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CINEMA 4D R11 Quickstart – MOCCA
Switch to the top view in the editor‘s menu (Cameras/Top) and zoom the window as needed to get a good
view of all four joints. As you can see in the top view, the joints are a little behind the geometry. It‘s important
to get the joints in exactly the right place inside the geometry in order for the automatic weighting to work
correctly later on.
When we created the joints in the front view, the Joint tool had no way to tell at what depth the joints
should be placed. We can deal with this now. The top view gives us the ideal place to move the joints inside
the geometry. In the Object Manager, click on the “Root” object (top object in the hierarchy of joints) and
in the editor, drag it a little along its negative Z-axis (downwards in our editor) until the joints are inside the
geometry.
Switch back to the front view. Zoom the window as needed to get a good view of the arm. Rename the joints
from “Joint”, “Joint.1” and “Joint.2” to “shoulder”, “elbow” and “hand” respectively (double-click).
In the Object Manager, click on the “+” symbol for “Turtle_Hypernurbs” to open the hierarchy for the turtle’s
mesh. Hold down the Ctrl key and click to select the “body” object and the three joints “shoulder”, “elbow” and
“hand”. Make sure that only these four objects are selected and choose Character/Bind in the main menu.
A Skin object is added automatically to our mesh as a child and a Weight tag is added. The Skin object will take
care of the deformation as the joints are moved and the Weight tag stores the weighting created automatically
by the Bind function for the individual joints.
Let’s take a look at the weighting. Deactivate the “Turtle_Hypernurbs” object in the Object Manager (the white
check mark turns into a red cross). Click on the “hand” joint and choose Character/Weight Tool in the main menu.
You’ll see the joint’s weighting appear in white in the editor. Black geometry means no weighting.