Creating the opposite side of the skeleton

00:03

Mayer has a handy tool which will copy one side

00:06

of the skeleton over to the other side for us,

00:09

go to skeleton,

00:11

mirror joints and open the options.

00:14

If we select the clavicle,

00:16

you can see we added underscore L to the end of its name.

00:20

So we know this is on the left side of the skeleton.

00:24

What we can do with the mirror joints,

00:25

tool is tell it to also rename the joints it creates for us.

00:30

So here we have search for set to underscore L

00:34

and replace with set to underscore R

00:38

mirror cross tells mayor which plane to work with.

00:41

So here it's set to YZ. So it's going to mirror across the X axis.

00:46

You need to imagine the Y and Z axes are forming a wall.

00:50

So the reflection will be on the opposite side of that wall.

00:54

We also want the mirror function set to behavior,

00:57

but we will look more into that option shortly

01:00

if we apply that. Now

01:02

you see we have the right arm,

01:05

if I select the arms and rotate them,

01:09

you will see that the arm's movement is mirrored too.

01:12

So when the left arm flaps the right arm flaps too.

01:17

This is a much better set up for the animator

01:18

because it means both sides animate the same way.

01:22

It also means you can copy animation from one side to the other.

01:26

Let's undo that and see what happens if we choose orientation instead.

01:39

Now the arms are moving the same way which can be good in some instances.

01:43

But for the animators, it would mean more work.

01:46

Let's add the arm back

01:49

and we will do the same with the leg.

01:54

You will also see that the joint names have been updated too.

01:58

So they have underscore R on the end,

02:01

there's one more joint, we need to mirror and that's the eye.

02:05

We don't need to use a mirror joint tool though

02:07

simply because we want to maintain the same orientation.

02:11

If we do use it,

02:13

you see the orientation is flipped.

02:16

Whereas ideally we want both eyes to work the same way.

02:21

OK, let's undo that

02:25

and just duplicate this eye

02:28

because a joint's translate values are based on its distance from its parents.

02:32

We can simply invert the translate X value to move the eye across.

02:37

This will place it in exactly the right place.

02:41

If I set this to just be a minus number,

02:45

the eye moves across and maintains the same orientation,

02:49

all we need to do now is update the name.

02:53

OK. That's the orientations updated.

02:57

So let's hide the rotational axes. Now

03:01

select the hierarchy first.

03:05

Now go to display transform, display local rotational axis.

03:10

There we go.

03:12

Our base skeleton is looking much better now

03:14

and each joint will also rotate correctly too.