Controlling the Alien Plant skeleton with the controllers
The final step in creating the Control Rig for our Alien Plant is to get the controllers to drive/control the skeleton. The Control Rig system can be used to create very complicated rigs that are beyond the scope of this book. The Control Rig system uses a series of nodes that can be linked together in a visual way to drive the behavior of our Animation rig.
For a simple FK, we just need a few basic nodes in our Rig Graph panel, as follows:
- Forwards Solve: This node simply starts the flow of the rig node logic and is at the start of any Control Rig we build.
- Set Transform - Bone: This is typically used to "set" or receive the transform values from the controller and apply them to the bone.
- Get Transform - Control: This is typically used to "get" the transform values from the controller and feed them to the bone.
If this sounds complicated, don't worry. It is simpler in practice...
