Super Noob rigging question: rotation of controls

#1

Hello everyone,

I’m working on my first real character rig. The last time I rigged something was in 1999 in Animation Master, so I’m a bit out of practice. Anyway, I’m trying to get the rotation of the controls for the FK arms to be zero, which I was able to by freezing the transforms. The problem is that when I select the rotate tool, I want the rotations to run with the arm, not zeroed to the world like they currently are.

I feel like the answer would be to somehow group the NURBs control object and then zero those out, then ungroup, but that doesn’t work.

:bowdown: 1000 CG good karma points to anyone who can help me out. :bowdown:

#2

Parent constrain control and an empty group to the joint, delete the constraints, parent the control under the group. DONE!

1,000 points to myself!

#3

Hello Floyd, it’s been a while.

The quick way to do what you asked is to dupicate the control, parent the original to the new one, and then delete the shape node on the new control. This gives you a null node in exactly the same place as the control so it’s parented offset is zero.

Another way for FK is to simply parent the shape node to the joint. If you create a nurbs circle called nurbsCircle1 and have a joint, joint1, you can parent the shape node with the mel command;
parent -r -s nurbsCircleShape1 joint1;

This second way will result in faster rigs because you don’t need a constraint on every FK joint.

Cheers,

Richard

#4

you must type faster than me as you replied to your own post as I was typing one to you.

oh well, same result but now you know another way to do it.

Richard

#5

It has been a while! I hope all is well!

Ok, now I have the issue of how do I get the controls to move when the control above it is rotated? Just straight parenting them adds rotations back onto the controls, which I don’t want.

#6

You need to put a pad between them to clean up the incoming values. So it would be

Parent Control
-group to take incoming values
–The next control

Just group what will be the child and snap the pivot of the group to the control curve’s pivot.

#7

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