Pre-Binding

[misterdi]

Have you set preferred angle on the kinematic joints?.

Best regards,

[Quizboy]

I have set preferred angle. The way i did this, as recommended by A/W is to select the root joint at the base of the spine "pelvis" i've named it, and then Skeleton > set preferred angle.

I have a post under Character Rigging which shows pictures of the problem i'm having.

[Quizboy]

To clarify, when i select "pelvis" all the joints highlight since it is the root joint. Furthermore i'm not having any problems flexing the joints, they flex the correct angles as they should.

[Sammy]

quizboy, you actually have it backwards ... you must NEVER translate a joint - only rotate them into place (yes, it's a huge pain) unless it's a root joint. This could explain the 'strange' behavior from your joints.

If you're familiar with MEL and the rigging process I'd suggest a handy dandy AUTORIGGER.

The primary difference is that with these autorigger's you CAN translate the proxy-joints into place and then hit the BUILD button and it generates a clean rig - I've been playing with Antony Ward's Creature Tools Pro v4.0 (on highend3d.com).

It takes a little while to get into it - but once I got my bearings with it I can't see myself building rigs from scratch unless I have NO other option now. It saves so much time - I can now put all my effort into exercising my models rather than rebuilding rigs.

There's another one called Animan which has a host of nice features as well ...

-Sammy

[kmp3d]

Originally posted by Sammy
quizboy, you actually have it backwards ... you must NEVER translate a joint - only rotate them into place (yes, it's a huge pain) unless it's a root joint. This could explain the 'strange' behavior from your joints.


Huh?? I dunno I'm not the most experienced rigger but I would think that you don't want to rotate your joints into place..... that way if you want to get to bind pose easily just zero out the joint rotations. I always translate my joints into place and then orient them the way I need, since most of the time joints are rotated not translated I don't really care about non-zero joint translations. I never experience any weird flipping doing it this way or any strange control problems. I may over looking something or causing problems doing it this way but I have never experienced any. Anyone else care to comment?????? :shrug:

[Modulok]

I don't think it matters actually....

Build your skeleton, rotate translate, whatever you want with the joints. Then select the root joint and Modify>freeze transform.

This will screw up the joints local rotation axis, not to worrie...Skeleton>Orient joint. Then go through your skeleton and tweak the local axes of the joints so you have a standard...(like Y axis always points toward the inside of the joint or whatever you setup) Use MEL to do this accurately, or you can usually get away with using a "discreet rotation" on the rotate tool, of like 90degrees...bla bla bla

As for joint translations, when you freeze transform they will still be there (if I remember right) but they don't really matter, as far as I've found anyway. Because the only joint you will ever be translating is the root joint.

-Modulok-

[dmcgrath]

If you need more input you can check my tutorial in my signature.
What I do is set the joints in place roughly and then open up the AE. In here you can find the Joint Orient area, which is what I use to set the joints in place. Only rotating the Orients keeps the actual rotate values at zero. Then you only have the translate in X, and hopefully the others at zero as well.

[Quizboy]

thanks i'll read this tutorial now. ugh, why is this all so complicated?

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