how to mirror a rig

[M3M3R]

You just have to link and wire the contraints again. Same for the helpers.

[Piflik]

I mirrored an Arm lately, complete with wiring and Reactions...took some attempts, but now it works as it should...I first copied the original arm (without mirroring) and then mirrored the root (methinks). Then I moved the control objects to their right positions...

[PEN]

You don't want to mirror anything in a rig like that. What you have just done is inverted the transform matrix for each of the objects in the hierarchy from a right handed matrix to a left handed. Doing this may not show any immediate problems but it will show amny later as you start to try and do more with the rig. It is always best to use bone mirror tool which rotates bones into their mirror position without inverting the matrix, you can need to rebuild the other side, don't mirror the controls over as those will end up inverted. Align the controls to the bones that you have mirrored.

[xothermik]

thanks a lot guys kinda even gave up and did the other side again when i didnt get a response on time. and paul thanks for the explanation. by the way love ur scripts.

[designingpatrick]

It seems that the mirror bone operation flips at least one axis. Is this the desired result? I'm not sure if this is true, but I believe ideally, the twist axis and the up axis should stay locally identical while the tangent axis should be mirrored- but the results are that one axis (Y or Z) will be pointing opposite of the desired vector.

http://www.patrickcoan.com/temp/jointOrientation.jpg

I didn't find this to be a big problem, but I'm using script controllers to extract rotations, and the script I have been writing has been assuming that the joint's x rotation are oriented at zero (or very close to zero). After mirroring a joint, the x-axis rotation is something like "3.1665e-007". Setting it to zero flips it.

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