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SeanC
02-01-2008, 12:59 AM
I am having trouble orienting my controls for the correct arm flap where both shoulders rotate together to clap in front; instead of rotating opposite each other.

If i select the joints directly and rotate them, I get the result I want. The problem I'm running into is getting the controllers to behave correctly.

The local rotation axis of both controls are the same by default. As I attempt to manually change the axis my controllers adopt non-zero rotations. Am I going about this wrong?

I could not find any rigging tuts or guides that tackle this problem, and I was wondering what the proper way to achieve this effect is?
Geuse
02-01-2008, 11:07 AM
Well, you want the control icons to have the same local rotation axis as the joints, right?
Since we can't change that directly we can do a work around.
This is what I do in maya, but I'm sure you can apply it to your app.

Create a group or a locator, I usually prefer group since it doesn't show in viewport. Now select the joint and then the group/locator and do an orient constrain with maintained offset turned "off" as we want the group to have the same rotation axis as the joint! Then delete the constraint, but whatever you do do not freeze the group/locators transformations. So now, all we need to do is parent(no constrain) the control icon to this group and freeze it transformations. Se how it changes it's local rotation axis to line up with the group's. And the groups has the same as the joint, meaning the joint and the group are both zeroed out in rotation and have exactly the same local rotations! Perfect, now you only need to orient constrain the joint to the control icon and that should be it!
shinyprem
02-01-2008, 03:50 PM
Hi..!

If you have mirrored the bones frm left side to the right you would get result wat u have asked in the very first place itself.

Rgds,
PEN
02-01-2008, 05:29 PM
Read about rotations here. http://www.paulneale.com/tutorials.htm

This might help you understand how they work.
SeanC
02-01-2008, 07:58 PM
that works beautifully, thanks guys.. I would have never thought to use the orient with maintain offset off.

thanks for the link PEN it helps a lot, very informative.
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