Maya Bonus Tools - Auto Rigging Tools

there are several modular rigging tools that are part of bonus tools including setup arm foot back and stretchy ik these can be used as is or they can be used as references for building your own custom tools so the way they work is you basically have to create controllers for your body parts so for instance you'd need an elbow controller and you'd need a hand controller now these would just be simple curves so you would load the hand controller and likewise you would set the elbow controller then you would go in and choose which joints you want them to control starting with the shoulder down to the wrist if you have twist joints for the elbow or for the arm rather you can include those otherwise you simply apply and you give it a prefix so this would be the right side of my character so i'm going to use right underscore and apply that will go in and attach the controllers accordingly so now the hand controller becomes a controller for the ik of the arm as well as a rotation controller for the hand itself the elbow controller becomes a driver for the pole vector this same process can be repeated on the right side of the character the stretchy ik tool allows you to create stretch on an existing ik chain so you would do this based on an existing ik handle so in this case i'm using the the x-axis so i apply that and now when i pull on this controller you can see i get a certain amount of stretch on the arm now this is actually calculating the scale of the arms based on the distance between the shoulder and the elbow and giving me a threshold beyond that that i can extend beyond the script could be customized to add translation instead of scale or to change the amount of stretchiness the setup foot tool is similar to the setup arm tool but with some additional controls you first of all define the foot controller which is a curve or locator that you create then you define the knee controller which is also a curver locator you create and then you have a couple of options here one you can choose to include or not include a heel joint and you can also do three different methods for the creation of the foot controls so i'm going to go in and actually start by selecting the hip and the ankle which are the main control objects for the ik chain and then i'll just use ik handles and apply so we'll give this a prefix we'll call this write again and what that will do is it will give us a control with basically ik for the foot and it will give us rotation for the foot and it will also give us some controls for lift as well as toe lift toe twist and things like toe wiggle all these get built on directly to the controller we also of course have the knee controller which drives the pull vector for the ik handle as an alternative we can use parent constraints or set driven keys so as an example if i apply a set driven key once again naming this right for the right leg this will give me a similar controller it will basically give me a fk ik controller which allows me to or rather an ik controller with fk for the the foot but it gives me a simple roll attribute for instance when the foot is planted on the ground it gives me a single roll attribute that basically combines all of the three controllers that are multiple controllers rather that i showed before so now the one roll attribute will basically roll the foot from the heel all the way to the toe the setup back tool allows you to rig a back using a spline ik rig with clusters essentially so you can control the number of clusters in the which basically is related to the density of the curve and then you can also choose to use custom objects for controllers for the base and top of your rig so for instance this is a simple curve that would drive the base of my character and then this is a simple curve that would drive the top so i'll choose this as a bottom controller and i'll choose this as a top controller and then i'll go in and choose the joints from the base of the spine to the top of the spine or the base of the neck rather and then i'll rig the back that will give me and a control over the center of the character so you'll notice that i can actually move the character around based on the hips and notice that i've already rigged the right hands and the right foot so those are actually locking in place as you would expect and then i have another controller here for the back so this basically allows me to either move the back back and forth or pivot it forward to backwards or pivot it side to side the lower controller also can have a pivot as well if you need to do a wiggle so again these four tools are modular in their design but they're also meant to be prototypes or examples for anyone that needs to build their own custom rigging tools

Channel: My Oh Maya

Views: 5,037

Keywords: Maya, Autodesk, 3d, 3d modeling, 3d animation, M&E, demo, tutorial, rigging, rig, arm, foot, ik, stretchy, setup, contraint, control

Id: yK5qlIznX88

Length: 5min 28sec (328 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020