An Essential Introduction to Maya Character Rigging

1. An Essential Introduction to Maya Character Rigging by Cheryl Cabrera Chapter 5 Skeleton Setup for a Biped Character: Joint Placement

2. Characters by Faye Helfer, Nathan Englehardt, Dan Nichols, Nick DuBois, and Mark McDonald.

3. Traffik by David Bokser (2003).

4. Joint Placement Workflow.

5. The hierarchy of a joint chain as seen in the Hypergraph.

6. Frog Ballerina by Sarah Pitz.

7. Create Reference can be found under the File menu.

8. The Create Reference options window.

9. The Reference Editor.

10. Replace Reference and Remove Reference can be found in the Reference Editor under the Reference menu.

11. Import Objects from Reference can be found in the Reference Editor under the File menu.

12. Proper Character Placement for rigging.

13. The image of the character on the left looks similar in scale to the image of the character on the right. However, on closer look, the character on the left is actually the scale of the image in the middle. Make sure that your character is not too small, as it will cause problems with some tools and when animating.

14. Shading X-Ray Joints.

15. The Joint tool can be found in the Animation menu set (F2) on the keyboard under the Skeleton menu.

16. Two joints are connected visually with a bone.

17. The long bone radius changes the size of the joint based on the distance it is from the following joint. Changing the long bone radius to 0.5 will prevent this.

18. Joint Size options.

19. The Cartesian coordinate system and its point of origin.

20. A sphere that has been created at the origin and is in World space.

21. A sphere that has been moved from the origin and rotated shows a different coordinate system called Object space.

22. A sphere (left) that has been moved from the origin and rotated with its parent shows a different coordinate system called Object space. The same sphere (right) showing Local space.

23. Local rotation axis set to XYZ on a vertical joint chain, where the axis does not line up from one joint to the next.

24. A spine chain prepared for Forward Kinematic control.

25. A spine chain prepared for Inverse Kinematic control.

26. Displaying the Local Rotation Axes in Object Mode requires that each and every joint be selected.

27. Displaying the Local Rotation Axes in Component Mode requires that the top of the hierarchy be selected to see all of the Local Rotation Axes for that hierarchy.

28. Moving a joint into place will also move any joints below it in the hierarchy (left), unless the move pivot mode is toggled on by pressing the Insert key on the keyboard (right).

29. Rotating or scaling joints into place requires the Freeze Transformation command to reset the values.

30. Warning signs for non-zero rotations appear during the reorientation process if the joint’s transformations have not been frozen.

31. Orient joint option box.

32. Manual rotation of a joint’s Local Rotation Axis is possible for fine tuning joint rotation.

33. A MEL command can be used for precise rotation of the axis.

34. Little Billy by Sean Danyi (2003).

35. An Essential Introduction to Maya Character Rigging by Cheryl Cabrera Assignment 5.1: Creating a spine, head, and neck skeleton

36. Setting all four view panels to X-Ray Joints mode.

37. The Joint tool option settings.

38. Adjusting the display size of the joints.

39. Positioning and renaming the spine joints.

40. Placing the pelvis joint.

41. Placing and renaming the neck and head joints.

42. Placing and renaming the jaw joints.

43. Placing and renaming the tongue joints.

44. An Essential Introduction to Maya Character Rigging by Cheryl Cabrera Assignment 5.2: Creating an arm and hand skeleton

45. Placing and renaming the arm joints.

46. Repositioning the arm joints.

47. Placing and renaming the clavicle joints.

48. Repositioning and reorienting the clavicle joints.

49. Placing and renaming the middle, index, and ring finger joints.

50. Placing and renaming the thumb and pinky finger joints.