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View Full Version : Solid body rigging...and cloned characters

lehthanis
05-25-2006, 02:10 PM
I have 2 questions...both are probably quickly answered.

1) I've started building my rig for my spider lady...and I have all the bones in place and the IK solvers for the legs...now I'm moving on to controllers and helpers and whatnot...but first I'm curious if I even need the big bone thats inside her body...the bulbous spider body part will not deform...only the legs, the human waist will bend, and the spinneret tail MIGHT move...I have a dummy there as a root node...attached to it is the parent bone for each of the 6 legs, the bottom spine bone for the human torso, and the big bone for the body...But I'm thinking I may not need that big bone right? I can just link the spinneret bone to the root dummy and leave the big bone out right?
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/6102/bones2np.gif

2) This scene will have two of these spider lady's interacting with each other in both stills and animations...So once I get her all rigged up and skin-weighted...I'm going to clone her. I know max tries to intelligently rename things...so what I did is wrote a maxscript that loops through all selected objects and appends _Widow01 to its name. So now I have for example: Bone_LArm01_Widow01, Bone_LArm02_Widow01, etc...When I go to clone this model and all the bones and IK solvers and whatnot...I assume its going to leave the names mostly in tact and change all the _Widow01's to Widow02's...correct? or am I overlooking some fundamental problem that I'm going to be faced with when cloning an IK capable rig with controllers?
eek
05-25-2006, 06:38 PM
Essentially yes, you dont need a the main bone. But i'd just leave it in for now, as you may need to change the control rig/helpers etc. And by linking it directly to the helper the helper is now part of the skin. Because you gotta skin the body to something?

As for renaming - max uses loose referencing, for instance when using script_controllers/expressions a vector or a scalar can reference a node, a track or even a controller. When you reference a node you can essentially clone that object with its controllers - its referencing will hold up.

Postition and orientation constraints are slightly different - they work in world space and the target wont update cloning the rig. So maybe a script that updates the targets with the new _01 name to - if you have position and orientation constraints.

cheers,
lehthanis
05-25-2006, 06:54 PM
Currently the only constraint I have is a lookat constraint...not too terribly difficult to setup, so I should be able to recreate it if necessary.

Thanks for the help/advice tho!
CarlosA
05-30-2006, 09:25 AM
your best bet is to make a copy of your file rename your rigg and merge it into your scene. this way you don't deal with the messy ness of cloneing.

cheers,
Los.
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