HumanIk workflow, joint orientations questions

#1

Hi,

I’m getting into a Maya setup workflow, coming from a 3DS Max background.

Plan:
Use HumanIK as the base rig, for easy mocap and export to game engines.

Problem:
I want to take my A posed character and use HumanIk, without having incorrectly oriented joints.

After clicking create skeleton, I repositioned the joints to fit the model. Most areas are fine, but the fingers and wrist in particular are a mess, in terms of joint orientation. When I change the orientation using the Joint Orient tool, it seems to go right back, and even with the orientation changed, the Joint is still rotated in the same wrong way.

I read on another forum that you can delete the node HIKSkeletonGeneratorNode1, but then you also lose the mirroring and other skeleton creation options in HumanIk.

Can anyone suggest a good workflow? to achieve this? Also, what is the best way to store the default model pose as well as a TPose for HumanIk?

I positioned the joints, created a Bind on the model then keyframed the arms in their default position one one frame and in the TPose on another frame. Is this a possible way? Still need to fix the arm and hand joint orientations before I can test that out properly though.

Thoughts or ideas?

Thanks,

Adnan

#2

I ended up adjusting my model to be in a tpose. That made it easier to get the joints aligned. However, the finger joints are still a mess. The joint orientations are terrible. I don’t know how to fix this in HumanIk. I don’t want to delete the node I mentioned in the last post, as it will also remove a lot of functionality. Is it really so limited, that there is not a way to adjust joint orientations?

Adnan

#3

I am having a similar problem. I adjusted all of my joint orients to be x-down as that is what another tutorial said was needed. My rig by itself worked great. I characterized it, still seems fine. As soon as I retarget to a mocap, all of my geometry, which was parent constrained to the skeleton, not skinned as it is a robot, the geometry breaks all over the place. Seems the joints adjust themselves to the mocap, regardless of how I oriented the originally.