User Guide > Overview > Digital Assets   

Interacting with Digital Assets

In other lessons, you have learned how to give a digital asset a high-level interface using handles and HUD sliders. In complex cases such as a character, it would be too much for all of the controls to appear when you select the asset. Imagine feet, hand, body, and facial controls all appearing at once. A way to control the clutter is for the asset to give you either direct control over the objects within the asset or let you select nested digital assets that contain simpler, more focused interfaces.

In this lesson, you will interact with a digital asset character using the Pose tool. Within this character's network are nested digital assets that act as controls for the feet and hands. You will access these controls by interacting with object inside the digital asset subnet. You will also interact with other objects inside the digital asset such as nulls or bones.

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1. Transform the Asset

Press s to call up the Transform tool then click on the character and RMB-click to accept. This selects the whole character and brings up a transform handle that affects the transform values of the asset itself. Use the handle to position the character to the left and rotate the character by around 45 degrees. This method is good for establishing the asset's starting position.


2. Pose the Pelvis

Press tab > Pose. Choose Select > Select Entire Subnet to toggle it Off. This lets you access the parts inside the digital asset subnet. Use the same Pane menu to turn Secure Selection off. This will make it easier to quickly change your selection as you pose the character.

Click on the pelvis control then RMB-click to accept. This null object is inside the digital asset. Use the pose handle to drop the pelvis down until the character's knees are bent. You can also use this to rotate the hips a little.


3. Work with Nested Digital Assets

Next, click on the cube null object sitting in front of the character's left knee. This selects the nested digital asset that controls the foot. A handle appears at the heel and two HUD sliders appear that give you control over the toe roll and the ball roll. Position the foot with all of these controls. Next, click on the cube null object in front of the right knee and use this same digital asset control to position the right foot.

When you turned Select Entire Subnet off, you made it possible to select an object directly even if it sat inside one or more subnets. By default this means that you would dive right down to the low level object. The nested digital assets would therefore be skipped because they are intermediate level subnets. To force the Pose tool to recognize the nested asset, simply set every object contained within the asset to unselectable. The Pose tool will then jump up to the subnet level above the selected object. If this subnet is a digital asset, then its handles and HUD sliders will be displayed.

Click on the null object selector at the character's left wrist. This jumps your selection to another nested digital asset control that has sliders for rotating the hands and a handle for positioning the arm.


4. Pose the Head 

In some cases, you can take advantage of how the Pose tool works with parts of a character directly. To pose the character's head you can select the head bones directly as long as their rotation parameters have been promoted to the top level of the digital asset.

Click-drag a selection box over the character's head to select the head bones. Oops! You selected the whole character. This is because the character's geometry is unselectable therefore you are jumping up to the digital asset level. In the network pane, make the Beatrice character unselectable and then selecting the geometry won't do anything.

Now click-drag again over the character's head to select the neck and head bones. Because you are using the Pose tool, you get a temporary end effector to adjust the head using Inverse Kinematics. Press x if you want to use global controls and rotate the bones. Make sure to press x again before you start posing the character any more because the nested digital asset controls will not show up in this mode.