maya basic overview of using the HIK Control Rig

maya basic overview of using the HIK Control Rig

you will learn techniques for reusing control rigs in Maya to work more efficiently. Throughout the tutorial you will learn techniques for re-purposing rigs to save time in your character setup pipeline. We'll start by merging a completed rig into our character's scene. At that point, we will start modifying the rig to match the proportions of our character. Moving on from there, we will then add controls that are necessary to accommodate any new accessories that require controls.ted & Numbered List tips
Character Rigging In Maya Continued
Select the LHip joint, and then Shift Select the COG joint, now press P to parent the LHip to the COG Joint, a bone will appear between them : - 
Now do the same with the Left_Clavicle and Neck joint, and then again with the first joint on each of the fingers and the thumb and parent to the Left_Hand joint, you'll end up with something like this : -

Ok, we've now set up and parented all of our joints, now there's one last thing to do now before we've finished with the skeleton, and that's to Mirror our Joints from the Left Side over to the Right Side. Select the Left_Clavicle joint and then from the menu select Skeleton > Mirror Joint and open the options box, within the options, select YZ as the Mirror options and Orientation as the Mirror Function : -
Select Mirror, and you should now have the right arm set up, including the parented joint :-

Do the same now for the LHip and then again for the LReverse_Foot, that's it, we now have all of our joints mirrored across. We don't need our Local Rotation Axes displayed anymore, so select each joint one by one, and then issue the command DISPLAY > COMPONENT DISPLAY > LOCAL ROTATION AXIS, or press G to repeat the last command. Once you've done that to all the joints, open up the Outliner. We need to rename our joints that we have mirrored across, essentially we need to differentiate the two sides, so Left and Right is enough to do that, so rename all the mirrored joints so that they are R - Right related, as in

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maya problem with the Skeleton/HumanIK tool and undo

maya problem with the Skeleton/HumanIK tool and undo

On loading the plug-in, you're shown a dedicated menu and persistent tool shelf.

The icons aren't immediately intuitive, with several looking similar to each other.

Even with repeated use, you may find you need the tooltips to jog your memory.

Since most artists will likely be interested in straight-up full-body animation, let's use a simple biped with low spine resolution (two joints) as an example.

Set-up is completed in seconds with a few clicks; slightly longer if you go to the trouble of making control objects.

Once joint limits have been tuned via on-screen controls, the business of animating can begin.

Simple animations can be knocked out fairly rapidly, achieving fluid, believable motion with little effort.

Overall, the solver works well, and for those wanting to animate in FK you are given the option of duplicating the entire hierarchy (effectively setting up a 1:1 retarget) and using those joints to key FK rotations in addition to
your IK.

This works, although it's not as convenient as a true IK/FK switch in a good articulation rig.

With a more detailed skeleton, additional care is needed in setting up and tuning, and the solver is prone to less predictable behaviour.

Selecting undo will not always guarantee a return to the exact space you had before moving your task, which can be quite frustrating.

The solver model is currently non-deterministic, such that playing from frame 0 can give a slightly different result each time.

Future development could perhaps address this with an additional solving mode.

If you have existing animation to re-target, this can be achieved through a basic interface for mapping source to target.

While it will do its best to match bones based on namespace, it's fairly straightforward to script an automation with the supplied API.

This also becomes necessary when working with a large data set, as there is no batch mode.

Mapped tasks can have scale attributes tweaked to compensate for size discrepancies between characters, although it's generally worth globally scaling skeletons first to have the best shot at eliminating footskate:
relying on the attributes alone doesn't entirely solve the issue.

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applying fur to a character in maya

I've been working on a project involving the use of maya fur. It's the first time I have rendered fur using the mentalray renderer, so there was much to learn. One of the difficulties I encountered was dealing with the illumination of near-white colored fur (like a polar bear). In the past, using maya's native software renderer, I would have added fur shadowing attributes to my lights to allow me to control and balance the amount of illumination on the fur, but these attributes are not supported by mentalray so I had to find another way.

In this post I show an approach to rendering near-white colored maya fur with mentalray.

I'll start by creating a torus to which I have attached a fur description with the polar-bear preset. I have two spotlights for illumination. Here's a top-view snapshot of the setup.I want my fur to be almost white, so the underlying surface needs to be faily pale. I'm using a simple cream colored lambert with some ambient color to brighten it up.

I want to achieve a soft look without any shine so I started with the polar-bear preset but changed the Light Model to Ambient + Diffuse (so no specular component). And I set clumping = 0.

If I render it without changing anything else I get this.

 

This is using the standard scanline/raytrace render method, not the rasterizer, and it took 1 min 30 secs (I'll use this time for comparison).

Tip #1: Change Fur Shader from Hair Primitive (default) to Volume in the mentalray section of the Fur Render Settings. Here's what it renders like.

And this only took 16 secs (thats six times faster!).

I want the fur to be even whiter than this so I added base and tip ambience to brighten it up.

 

Which renders like this

 

This is closer to the color I want, but now the fur looks too bright and its luminance is clipped harshly at the top end of the luminance range. Lowering the intensity of my lights would prevent the clipping, but then everything else would be too dark and my fur would look dirty.

Tip #2: Use a tone mapper. I used mia_exposure_photographic as a lens shader attached to my camera. Here is a snapshot showing the exposure attributes.

 

The Cm 2 Factor setting makes all the other attributes work in the desired exposure range. I reduced gamma to 0.5 to give me a bit more contrast between the whites and the near-whites. And it now renders like this

 

Tip #3: Play with the Shadow Density Scale in the furDEscription's Volume Fur tab. By increasing this from the default 0.125 to 0.5 I get nicer fur shadowing.

Tip #4: For the underlying surface use incandescense instead of ambience. This will eliminate the darkness of the shadows that the fur makes on the underlying surface. So my lambert looks like this

 

Well I'm pretty happy with the color now, but the over-all look is a bit dull. Some tasteful burn out will give it the appearance of a bit more dynamic range so I increase the exposure Burn Highlights from 0 to 0.03 and here is the result

 

Have fun with fur. There is so much to experiment with.

 

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import Maya constraints in MOTIONBUILDE

 import Maya constraints in MOTIONBUILDE

Animating a character flipping or spinning around can be a hurdle in 3d. A character will forward flip over a different center of gravity then if it were to spin around 180 degrees on its right heel. Typically the solution is to set up a hierarchy of groups with pivots at different locations in which the animator can choose to rotate individually as needed. The problem with this solution, besides the redundancy of having so many group nodes to dig through, is that it takes a heavy amount of preplanning to pull it off cleanly. The idea here is to make one control that will easily move around the character's center of gravity in order to rotate the character as a whole around that center.

Let it be clear that this is a MOVABLE pivot not an ANIMATABLE pivot. What that means is that it is generally a one time deal per shot. Once the control starts rotating, translating it can cause some very funky results. If you have a character that is walking and then you use the movable pivot to make it turn left 90 degrees on its heel, trying afterwards to move the pivot over to the right heel will cause the character to translate oddly. However, if the character does a forward flip 360 degrees (essentially rotating the control back to its initial orientation), then the control can be moved and used again.

1. Create a locator (create > locator), name it "objectLocator"
this will represent the character rig or object to be rotated at different centers

2. Group objectLocator to itself and name the group "locatorBuffer"
this is where the movable pivot will do its work leaving the objectLocator free to be transformed as needed underneath

3. Create a nurbs circle (create > nurbs primitives > circle), name it "movable pivot"
this will represent the movable pivot control that is simply translated into place and then rotated4. Open the connection editor (window > general editors > connection editor), select the movablePivot control and click Reload Left in the connection editor then select the locatorBuffer group and click Reload Right in the connection editor

5. Find and click the translate attribute on the left side to select it and then find and click rotate pivot on the right side to make the connection. This will lock the Rotate Pivot of the buffer node to the translate values of the movable pivot. Next we need to connect the rotation of the movable pivot to that of the buffer node so find and click rotate on the left side to select it and then find and click rotate on the right side to make the connection | save my driven keys?

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