Hello
Right so I have rigged up a pepper shaker so I can animate it following this tutorial cgtuts
Now being a newbie at Maya I got no idea what’s going on. I’m trying to resize and move it back into my scene before I starting to animate it.
However I can’t seem to do either of those. Any idea about what I’m doing wrong or how to fix it.
Here’s a SS
Cheers.
You should try grouping everything and then scale it. The link to your tut seems broken (for me at least)
http://cg.tutsplus.com/tutorials/autodesk-maya/rigging-a-cartoon-bottle-using-maya/
Tried grouping and it just ends up scaling and destroying the model and joints
Did the group contain every single nodes of your scene? Did the hierarchy of your joints change during the process?
When you group an object, it sort of create a new scene for what’s inside the group. This way if you move the group around, scale or rotate it, it doesn’t change the coordinates and values on the objects themselves inside the group. Think of it as a box and everything inside is relative to that box, just as ungrouped objects are relative to the whole scene.
Another problem I see in your scene is that your object doesn’t have enough polygons. The way animation works is that when you deform something, it calculates the new value of each vertex depending on their initial position. If your object only has vertices on its corners, there can’t be any curve in the object since there are no vertices in the middle to be calculated after the deformation.
If you’re familiar with vector drawing, you’ll notice that working with Maya is similar but on a 3D plane. You place points and the application creates a shape from it.
Try using the “Add Edge Loop” tool under “Edit Mesh” to give it more divisions. Do it both vertically and horizontally. The more divisions you have, the smoother it will look when it curves.
This is why the bottle has so many “lines”, or edges properly said, in the images of the tutorial.
There is my Hierarchy of the group along with the scale of the scene in the background.
When I go to scale or move the group they seem to be changing at different ratios. The skeleton and controllers are rescaling at a much slower rate to the model. I tried scaling each one individually but that just caused the whole rig to break apart. Also increased the polygon count.
I’ve already done a render of what it’s meant to look like I’m just trying to get these shakers to animate.
You are getting “double transforms”. I cant see your exact heirarchy but I’ll assume the mesh is skinned to the joints so the joints move the mesh. Are your joints constrained to those control handles, so the ctrl-handles move the joints? Anyway, the only thing you need in the scale group is the control handles and probably the joints. (You can try it both ways and see). If you put the mesh in there as well then it will be scaled/moved twice, once by the group and then by the joints in the group. Alternatively you can turn off “inherits transform” on the mesh attributes, but usually its better to have one group for the mesh (the mesh group is not animated, it just keeps things organized) and a 2nd group for the animation controls.
David
just group the joints and scale. it should work fine.
never place any kind of mesh or curve (like of spline) inside the group.
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