Animation and Rigging Tools: FAQ, Known Issues and Feature Roadmap

[ernstAlert]

@;186379

Here is an image, you could pretend it’s a finger:

http://i.imgur.com/DJET9vX.jpg

I’d just like the option to have the rotations at 0,0,0 because unless it gets them perfect when generating them it’ll cause me a lot more trouble than it’ll save me.

As for the shape names, are you sure it’s Maya? By default something that I name Character, the shape node will automatically rename to CharacterShape, however for some reason your script expects the shape node to be named CharacterDeformedShape and modifying geometry or what not then trying to re-use that name causes your script not to try and name it CharacterDeformedShape but it’s still looking for it rather than CharacterShape. Is this something that Maya does for shapes that are referenced and have weighting?

The other thing… The hand pivots are generated based on fingers. That’s fine, until your character is missing fingers. It appears the rig where the character has a thumb and a mitt doesn’t get the hand pivots for unused fingers. Since I used Index instead of Middle, I miss the hand pivot, and the pinky pivot.

I see. Thank you for posting the image! That clarifies it perfectly. You’re referring specifically to the child joints. I thought you wanted all joints in world space and that made no sense!

As for the shape names, are you sure it’s Maya?
Nothing in the script looks for any hardcoded names. That function in particular is looking for the following crit:

#go through each found skin cluster, and if we find a skin cluster whose geometry matches our selection, get influences
                    for cluster in skinClusters:
                        geometry = cmds.skinCluster(cluster, q = True, g = True)[0]
                        geoTransform = cmds.listRelatives(geometry, parent = True)[0]


                        if geoTransform == geo:
                            f = open(path, 'w')
                            skinCluster = cluster

EDIT: To explain this snippet, it goes through each skinCluster you have in the scene, and queries the geometry of that skinCluster. That geometry is actually the name of the shape node. It then queries the parent of that, which is the transform node you see in the outliner and saves weights out with that transform node’s name. The fact your model is possibly referenced from what I can gather, might be causing this issues.

Is this something that Maya does for shapes that are referenced and have weighting?
possibly. So your mesh is being referenced into the file and you’re placing joints to that? I’m not sure how that will work out to be honest. Never tested that workflow, but I imagine the deformation tools won’t work for you in that case.

As for the hand pivots, I just confirmed this. The hand pivots still exist, but they get hidden when those fingers aren’t chosen. I’ll need to fix that.
In the meantime, you can select them with the following mel commands:

select l_hand_mid_pivot;
select r_hand_mid_pivot;
select l_hand_tip_pivot;
select r_hand_tip_pivot;
select l_hand_pinky_pivot;
select r_hand_pinky_pivot;