ART Maya Toolkit import and jiggle problem

Hi,

We’ve come across a couple of issues with the ART tools. First off with the jiggle joints. We’ve noticed that their rotation does not follow the parent control. When rotating the parent control the jiggle moves/translates along fine, but doesn’t rotate with it, instead pointing in it’s original direction. So if we have a ponytail sticking out from the neck, by twisting the head to the right, instead of the ponytail trailing behind it moves at the base but keeps pointing forward, so the result is that it curves around the right ear. They do follow when rotating the world controller, but that obviously is not a solution. This pretty much renders jiggle joints useless once characters deviate from being perfectly straight. Has anyone noticed this issue and are there any workarounds?

We’re also having trouble importing mocap onto ik controls or matching from fk to ik. The knee pole vectors and foot rolls are not solving and the end result is flips and pops in the knees and feet. The fk motion imports fine. We have tried all the different options in the import dialogue, and we have tried matching ik to fk with the match tool. I had an idea that it could be a strange character set up, but this still happens with a test character that is set up purely on the tool default settings (i.e. building the control rig without moving any of the joints). Has anyone had issues with this and does anyone have any solutions?

Cheers

Actually looks like we’ve got the jiggle thing figured. For anyone having this problem, the problem happens when the jiggle control rotates in Z and that doesn’t follow the body (X and Y do). I’ve gotten around this by creating a null and parent constraining it to the jiggle control so that it follows it perfectly but gets independent rotation values. The rotateZ value gets piped into a multiDivide with a Z input2 of -1, and that output Z gets piped into the _dynChain_ikHandle Roll. So far this seems to work, if anyone has a better workaround or can highlight any errors here, please let me know.