Game Character Development with Maya

There is one final visual aid we can add to help distinguish our control icons. We can alter each icon's wireframe color, essentially color-coding them.

At present, all of our controls are white. This is good because it makes them stand out. But what happens if we are looking from the side? Knowing whether you are selecting the left or right arm could be difficult. Adding colors to different areas of the rig will help to distinguish the side you are working on.

The color for each icon is currently locked to the Rig_Controls layer. Initially, this was a useful layer to havewe don't need it anymore, though, because we can now control the icons' visibility by means of our new visibility icon.

1.

Delete the Rig_Controls layer by right-clicking it in the Layer Editor and selecting Delete. All the icons will return to the default color of dark blue.

2.

Select the LeftFoot icon and open up its Attribute Editor by pressing Ctrl+A (Figure 12.76, left).

Figure 12.76. Adjust the color swatch under Drawing Overrides to color-code icons.

3.

Open up the Attribute Editor's Object Display pane, and you'll see three more sections: Ghosting Information, Bounding Box Information, and Drawing Overrides. Open Drawing Overrides (Figure 12.76, right). Make sure Enable Overrides is enabled, and then you can edit the color swatch just below it to choose a color for your icon.

4.

Now work your way around all of the icons, making the ones on the left blue, the ones in the middle green, and the ones on the right yellow. Choose any colors you prefer, as long as they are sufficiently different. You can even make every icon a different color if you like; just be sure the scene is easy to read.

You can see in Figure 12.77 that the icons are distinctive now; you can easily tell which side is which. Save the scene with its new colored icons as Kila_MainRig.mb.

Figure 12.77. Kila with color-coded icons

Apply color-coding to Grae's control icons, too.

    Related

    Категории