maya 5 shoulder setup

#1

hello,
there is a pretty neat stuff that it’s shown on cgchannel on the review they just made on maya 5.

if you look page 4 (I think), there is an avi that shows an shoulder arm setup using parent cnstraint that work pretty good.
I’ve try to mimic that behavior but can’t really get it.
Anybody has insight on how to set that up, it’s pretty cool i think, a lot of other setup could benfits on such a technique.

If you haven’t seen it here is the link.

http://www.cgchannel.com/news/viewfeature.jsp?newsid=1952&pageid=3

Cheers

#2

Saw the same thing and I’d also be really interested to see how this was done in a little more detail:thumbsup:

later:wavey:
loked

#3

What about something like this? I think I created this setup similiar to what was going on in that video, there are differences but its pretty close. I used Ik instead of FK though. Theres no parent constraints going on just some connections. This was just a quick test to see if I could get the clavicle control to work right. I think it should still work pretty well in most cases. Take a look and give some opinions.
Heres the maya 5 ascii file.

#4

Hey kmp3d,

Seems to work pretty well:thumbsup:

Dont you want to give a quick breakdown on exactly how you went about setting this up?

Thanks

later:wavey:
loked

#5

Yeah its not to difficult of a setup. If you look at hiearchy in the outliner you’re halfway there. But heres a mini tutorial:

  1. Layout the bones as they are in the scene.

  2. Add your Ik to the arm, create your locator for the arm snap it to the wrist, freeze trans, point constrain the IK to locator and orient the wrist joint to the locator, create your pole control object,freeze trans, and constraint (you know the basic arm constraint setup)

  3. Now group the arm to itself, and group the clavical to itself and group the scapula to itself, the reason for the groupings is so to keep the bones seperate. And finally group these 3 groups together.

  4. Now create a locator for the shoulder control and place it above the shoulder, freeze trans. Place the bone groupings from step 3 under the shoulder control. Now press insert and move the pivot of this locator to where you want the clavical and scapula to pivot from. If you select the shoulder locator in my scene you’ll see where I put the pivot. And turn on the selection handle for this locator. At this point you can also stick the pole control for the arm under the should control.

  5. Now group the shoulder locator to itself and press insert and snap the pivot of this group to the selection handle of the shoulder locator, you want the pivot of this group and the shoulder control locator to be in the same place. Look at my attached outliner an the group that is circled is this group, this is where you will automate the arm movement.

  6. Now you can group the IK, the arm control, and your main group together and call it arm.

  7. If you grab your shoulder control and rotate it you’ll get your shoulder movement. Now for the automated rotation.

  8. Select the hand control locator and the group that is circled in the attached image. Open your hypershade and graph up and down connections. Create a mult/divide node. Now what I did is connect the translate output of the hand locator to the mult/divide node then connect the output of the mult/divide to that group that is circled in red. In this example I’m using the translate of Y of the hand control to drive the Z rotation of the group. And the mult/divide node is used to tweak this value so you can increase or decrease your range of movement.

Get it??? Sure you could use a SDK or expression or something in the same way. But I just used a mult/divide node that way I could go back in and change the values in the mult/divide node to refine the shoulders range of movement. It looks like in that video that hes using SDK but I’m not sure. Any other comments or questions are welcome.

#6

Hey kmp3d,

Thanks for the breakdown. I’ll try it out tomorrow morning:thumbsup:

later:wavey:
loked

#7

Okay, I tried it out and it works perfectly. My only question is, is there anything wrong with this setup?? What are the pros and what are the cons?

later:wavey:
loked

#8

wow kmp3d,
very interesting…thanks a lot for the head up.
still I wonder about that stuff with the parent constraint is it near what you’ve done?
What do you think?
anyway I’ll try your stuff seems to be great and easy enough to set up…great stuff really

thanks a lot again

#9

still I wonder about that stuff with the parent constraint is it near what you’ve done?What do you think?

Yeah I’m not really sure, my only thought would be that instead of the actual parenting that I did in my setup, he just used parent constraints. Theres probably a million ways to achieve the same result. I just came up with that setup after I saw the interaction in that video. I know theres ways to improve it, for instance I could of used extra forearm joints, and extra bicep joints. I could have also created extra pivots for the clavical and scapula and using the same technique with the mult/divide node to create secondary bone motion that might be more realistic. It would be cool if Jason S. would chime in with insight on this setup. Anything I could do to improve it would be great.

#10

yeah you’re right,
that’s probably what they’ve done, though they probably used Setdriven key instead of multiple\divide 'cause when the arm is moving up, the shoulder update only if the arm is above the shoulder, not at the same time, maybe a bit more realistic.

thanks for the cool head up anyway.

cheers

#11

Hey guys, someone just referenced me to this thread (thanks Lance)… I did the video of the clav/shoulder setup for the maya 5 review, and since a bunch of ppl have asked about it, i made a short explanation of it on my site.

kmp3d is right, there are a ton of ways to achieve this setup… I simply did it this way to put to use the parent constraints and ik/fk blend from maya 5… since you know, it was a maya 5 review :stuck_out_tongue:

the approach posted above sounds interesting, i’ll have to try it out. i did use sdk, though.

anyway, the explanation can be found here -

www.vfxcreator.com

under the tutorials section (the ‘f1’ button… get it?)

feel free to email me with any questions…

cya!

-josh
josh@cgchannel.com

#12

Hey man thanks for the info. I’m glad you could share your insight into the actual setup on that video. I’ll have to try it and see if I can incorporate those ideas into my own setups. :thumbsup:

#13

hey that’s why I love that forum, all sort of great response.

thanks a lot, very helpfull.

cheers

#14

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