Organizing and Protecting a Character’s Elements
Layers and groups are two different ways of organizing character elements, but each are very useful in their own way.
Layers let you divide up different scene elements into groupings whose visibility, selectability, and renderability can be controlled. You can use layers to break a character down into sections so that you can quickly change selectability and visibility each layer.
For example, separate the model’s geometry, the skeleton, and the constraining objects for the rig each into different layers. This makes it easy to select and key only the elements that you want to.
Layers, however, live only at the scene level, so if you’re importing and exporting models between scenes, they’re not going to include any layer information. This is where groups can be of help.
For more information, see Scene Layers [ Scene Elements ].
Groups also let you put certain scene elements together, but unlike layers, groups can be made children of models and exported or imported with them. You can set up the same sort of groupings as you had with layers, except that your character needs to be within a model structure first.
Groups allows you to select multiple objects at a time and are important for sharing materials and setting up texture supports for many objects at a time.
If you’re using a number of methods of organizing your scene elements, beware of conflicting overrides between layers, groups, and render pass partitions. A single object can be told to be visible by its layer, invisible by a group, and then visible again by a partition all at the same time. This could lead to premature baldness from pulling out your hair at render time!
For more information, see Grouping Objects [ Scene Elements ].
Transform groups let you quickly set up a hierarchy for any selected objects with a null as a parent. This can be handy for quickly creating hierarchies for your skeletons or for the control objects in a rig.
For more information, see Transform Groups (Parenting with Null Objects) [ Animation ].
Using Consistent Naming Conventions
Use consistent naming conventions such as including a “g_” as a prefix for all of your geometry nodes. That way you can select entire groups of geometry objects just by typing g_* in the Selection text box. It also lets you write name-based utility scripts.
For example, you can write scripts that seek out all left-side elements (“l_”) and duplicate them and rename them to right-side elements (“r_”), or vice versa. This can be a huge time-saver!
Another reason to use naming conventions is to make selection easier. For example, if you add a “c_” as a prefix for all rig control elements, you know which parts are okay to animate. Then when you want to store poses and actions, you can select all the controls by typing c_* in the Selection text box.
When you create a scene or model, there may be certain parts of it that you don’t want to change or that you don’t want anyone else to change (this is particularly true in a workgroup environment). To help reduce the introduction of error, you can use locks to control the type of modifications allowed to parts of a scene. For example, if you’re a technical director, you can use locks to prevent modifications (accidental or otherwise!) to a rigged character. Or you can lock only the animation of certain parameters so that they’re available but can’t be keyed.
You can lock 3D objects, local models (not referenced models), parameters, animation mixers, groups, layers, clusters, and passes.
You can also apply locks at different levels: topology, animation, value, and all. These levels let you lock scene elements so that only certain types of modifications are restricted. For example, you cannot add or remove points from geometry that has been locked at the topology level.
For more information, see Locking and Tagging Scene Elements
[ Data Management ].
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