Maya what is rigging

For information on animating your control rig, see Control rigs, effectors, and pivots. Creating an automatic character rig with the One-Click option The Quick Rig tool is intended to be a fast way to add a character rig to an empty mesh. Creating a character rig with the Step-by-Step method Choose the Step-by-Step option to proceed through the same phases of the automatic rig generation in the Quick Rig steps above, but step-by-step.

Note: Some meshes have auxiliary meshes that accompany them, for example, eyes, hair, accessories, and so on. Use the Select All Meshes option to make sure that these are selected as well. Click the help icon or see Quick Rig tool for an explanation of each segmentation method. Note: Higher-resolutions take more time to process.

Note: Guides are placeholders that show the future position of each HIK joint; they are temporary transforms, and are not part of the skeleton.

You'll notice this when you have a chain of joints: each parent joint will be orientated to aim at its child joint. Let's put this to the test now and also cover the creation and editing of joints. Now, in the Front or Side view, use the left-mouse button to create a few joints. When you have created a chain of joints, hit Enter on the Keyboard to exit the tool. You can also exit the tool with the right-mouse button but this will create a final joint where the cursor was in the viewport.

Open up the Outliner and you'll see that the hierarchy of our joint chain is that of a parent-child relationship. Rotate the root joint and the rest of the chain will follow.

This is also known as Forward Kinematics movement: rotational movement that works from the root down to the tip. Now set the Rotate tool to Local under the Rotate Tool Settings and select the first joint in the chain. You should notice that the joint is orientated towards the child joint and the rotate channels all have zero values in them.

Pop over to the Attribute Editor and under the Joint tab you will find the jointOrient. Here you can see how the joint uses the orientation to aim at the child joint rather than have values set in the rotate channels. Activate the Translate tool, set the mode to Object and you should also notice that the joint aims at the child joint along the X-axis. This is known as the Aim Axis.

The translate X value of the child joint also gives us the length of the parent joint. This is very useful for adding extra features to your rig such as squash and stretch. Now we shall place the joints or orient them into the correct place within the mesh. I am pretty passionate about this point: if there is one thing that I feel is uber-important when rigging, it is the clean placement of joints.

As the joints are, very simply, pivot points, the placement of them will dictate how the character articulates. Bad placement equals bad deformation.

So here are some of the guidelines that I follow when creating joints. Firstly, only the root joint in a chain can have translate values in X, Y and Z. All children joints can only have a value in translate X giving us the length of the joint and all Rotation values for every joint must be at 0. When we actually come to creating the rig, we'll use some of Maya's default tools as well as a few scripts to aid us in the speedy creation of joint chains, my favorite being Michael Comet's Mel Script Suite.

Two of the most important features of joints, the jointOrient and the translate X the length of the joint. Rotation Order refers to the order of operation in which the orientation of the selected object will be evaluated in. Let's pick this apart in Maya. In a new scene, create a 3-joint chain that mimics an arm in the front view. What this means is that the Z axis will carry both the Y and X axes.

The Y axis will carry the X axis and the X axis will not carry any other axis. If you read it from right to left, it makes more sense, I find. Now if you have your rotate mode set to Local, you may think that this is not the case as you rotate the shoulder around. So set the rotate channels to 0 for the shoulder and set Rotate mode to Gimbal.

Rotate the arm now and you will be shown the true representation of what the axes are actually doing. Rotate the Y channel degrees and very quickly, you now have 2 axes sitting one on top of the other: the X over the Z axis. You have now hit Gimbal Lock, my friend: 2 axes giving a similar rotational movement.

This is not a good state to be in but one that is unfortunately unavoidable in some situations. So, how do we combat this? Well, quite simply, we need to figure out which rotational axes are the most important for that part of the rig and then edit the Rotate Order to support this. As long as we test the rig as we create it and open up the communication lines with the animator to find out how they intend to animate the character, we can put provisions in place to make their life easier.

Changing the Rotate mode to Gimbal. Lastly, we will look at creating animation controls. This will bring everything that we've covered so far together: parenting, hierarchies, constraints, clean placement and rotation order will all be at play here. You may be thinking, why not just animate the joints? This is fine with very simple rigs but there is only so much you can do with a purely joint-based setup. Plus animators are a wild bunch who are fond of deleting things they should not, and recreating a deleted joint will keep you up longer than recreating a deleted control on most occasions.

The most common object for animation controls is a curve. Curves are non-renderable and you can very quickly edit the shape by going into component mode. For every control, I like to create a small hierarchy using group transform nodes. This allows me to place and orient the control in the same exact location as the joint it will control, which is very important. It allows for secondary levels of control, and also it allows the animator to return the control back to the default state by zeroing out the translate and the rotate channels.

So let's try this out now on a simple 3-joint chain. Step 1: In IK, if we select the control and move it, then all the other bones will follow, which means the motion is calculated based on where the control point is ending up. This is the new concept as compared to FK. Step 2: FK is an older concept that was used to animate movies like Jurrasic Park.

In this approach, we do not have controls, so we have to rotate each bone individually. Step 3: Whereas in IK, we have to just move the control handles to achieve the same pose as shown below. Step 4: Also, when we move the control handle at the hips, we can see that in IK, the legs stay at the same place as they are in the world space, while in FK, the entire character moves as they are meant to be adjusted from the joints. Step 6: Suppose we have to do animation for a ball throwing hand in FK we adjust the hand and rotate the shoulder pivot to get the effect.

Prop rigging is used in scenarios like when in the above case, like a hat that the character can pick up, so we have to rig the props by adding control curves. And also, we have to take into consideration the pivot point. So, in this article, we have seen how the quick rig tool gets you started with human characters and also seen step by step method for rigging.

Also, we have touched on IK and FK concepts and how to constrain is used in rigging. Remember, rigging is fundamental to animation, so we have to keep it strong for better animation down the road. This is a guide to Rigging in Maya.

Here we discuss an introduction, methods to use Rigging in Maya using different methods.