im trying to create an animation control rig in maya
i’ve only done this once a few years ago but that was while following a video that i dont have access to anymore
just a heads up sorry if these questions seem kinda dumb i just need to refresh my memory on a few things to get back up to speed any help would be greatly appreciated
heres what i got so far but im not sure if im doing this right
i have a few questions
1.)should i use ik handles on the fingers? (the animations involve holding guns and other objects FPS type game)
2.)how do i create the box thats on the chest and hips? (i copy and pasted from another project) i would prefer to build everything from scratch so i can get a better grip on everything and make sure i avoid bringing in data from another project that might cause problems, (when i pasted the boxes they came with their own layers)
3.)what type of constraints should i use on the control objects, on the rings around the arms and boxes on the chest and hips
4.)does anyone have some advice on what else i should add to the rig? i seen some rigs with controls for the elbows and knees and completely seperate rigs for the IK handles (any tips, tricks or suggestions would be cool)
5.)is there anything i need to add to the rig that would be required to use it in UE4?
1: No; lock rotation for axis the fingers shouldn’t spin instead, in channel box. Easier to pose them that way.
2: Easy way: create a cube and assign new material to it; delete its shading group. Long way: create it line by line and group with Ctrl+G.
3: Rigging proxy controls you’ll want to use only constraints for bone rotations in most cases.
4: The elbow/knee controls are actually IK pivot controls; they are good to have for poses where IK effectors are too close to each other.
5: UE4 has a DCC plugin for Maya rigging which you should use instead of making this.
1.)ok so do i just parent them all to some control proxy? i seen some rigs that have a special control that lets you spread the fingers out and curl them in all together or one at a time. how can i do something like that?
2.)how do i delete the shading group in maya?
3.)what type of constraints?
4.)not sure what you mean by the IK effectors being too close, i dont know what the IK effectors are. are you talking about the ik handles?
5.)i tried using that thing and i didnt really understand how to use it so figured it would be better to learn rigging from scratch, besides i have a bunch of other things i want to animate for my projects so it’ll be a pretty usefull skill to have considering how not everything in games is a biped
Driven Keys tied to attributes called “curl”, “spread”, “relax” etc. etc. Then output all those sets into a plusMinusAverage node to add them all together and that finally to the bone rotation.
Open Hypershade editor with a model selected, graph the i/o connections of the shader and delete the shadingEngine node it outputs to (mostly called “shaderNameXXSG”)
Orient mostly, wherever you need to translate you can also use parent.
Ik effector is a node located under the end joint of the ik chain and it dictates the location of the end bone to the ik handle which then uses that and the start bone and the solverType node (generally ikRPsolver) to compute the chain rotations. Its simple 3d trigonometry, when the end effector is closer to the start bone than the sum of all bone lengths in the chian, youll get a bend, the ‘Ik pivot controls’ like BrUnO calls them are in fact the poleVector controls used to determine in which direction the bend happens. Basically a rotation along the endBone-startBone vector. Maybe have a look at the documentation for ikRP solvers to cover all your technical questions: http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/index.html?url=files/CSN_ikHandle.htm,topicNumber=d30e318272
Thats true mate, its always good to know some rigging. And I definitely encourage you to learn it, there is a good channel on youtube by autodesk themselves that teaches many of those things with nice explanations: https://www.youtube.com/user/MayaHowTos
However, I still share BrUnO’s advice (maybe after some maya rigging crash course) to have a look at the epic ART plugin again as it will make your maya>ue4 character pipeline experience way less painful. You dont have to worry about complex procedures to retarget animation from various sources to your character rig, figure out a skeleton hierarchy and baking procedures, youll get a pertty neat rig in a fraction of the time that it would take a beginner to come up with a primtive rig, etc. etc.
Anyway, if you have any more questions, just post em here.
just wanted to say im still not done i know i should have been a long time ago but i spent so much time watching video tutorials and getting discouraged so many times cuz alot of the tutorials would fizzle out half way and be missing information like switching from ik and fk. theres a few that use scripts but never go into too much detail explaining how they work so i spent a few days researching all of that and found something really interesting… a post someone made on another forum about this
http://tech-artists.org/forum/showthread.php?2807-The-IK-FK-Switch-in-Maya
1.)HIK in maya
2.)create 3 different bones one for ik one for fk and one as a result joint set
3.)create a button switch
4.)scriptjob
he mentions that he found four ways to handle ik and fk switching but that left me with a question…
Which method should i use with unreal engine? (im guna assume all these methods work and maybe its just personal preference but idk i might be wrong)
or better yet what do you guys recommend for switching from ik/fk?
btw
im actually going to be following another tutorial tomorrow im hopeing this next one actually works. it seems to be more promising then all the other videos i seen (its all written out super long tutorial) http://cgi.tutsplus.com/tutorials/building-a-complete-human-character-rig-in-maya–cg-14575
theres some parts where they use driven keys but im not sure if theres anything about ik fk switching with a script maybe just with the attributes/buttons
i have some more questions but their not that important i’ll save them for later but anyway thanks for the help adeptus and bruno
