Introduction to Maya - Modeling Fundamentals Vol 1
This course will look at the fundamentals of modeling in Maya with an emphasis on creating good topology. We'll look at what makes a good model in Maya and why objects are modeled in the way they are.
# 1 12-01-2007 , 11:04 AM
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Join Date: Dec 2006
Location: UK
Posts: 2

Rigging help

Hi All!

I hate to ask a question on my first post but i've come to a bit of a stumbling block.

I've gone through all the tutorials so im aware of the basics and am using them for reference, but I'm trying to rig the following model I have made :

user added image

It seems every time I build a skeleton and attach it to the skin it will without fail mess around with all of the other parts of the model.

Now being a robot it's supposed to have very centralised movement so it essentially pivots at the points with no blending.

I have tried painting the weights to everything except for the joint areas themselves, but it still doesnt have the desired effect ?

Does anyone know of a decent "robot rigging" tutorial ? or have any suggestions of how I can set up the skeleton ?

Apologies if there is an easy answer to this , ive only been learning about 2 weeks user added image

Thanks in advance to any advice people can offer!

(p.s i'm aware that there is a shocking resemblence to Nintendos "Chibi Robo" .. I plan to change this)

# 2 12-01-2007 , 12:29 PM
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Join Date: Jun 2004
Location: Cleveland, Ohio (USA)
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i think your answer lies in parenting all your objects to each other up the limb hierarchies, and then just keying a regular rotate... no real need to rig it, since you do NOT want any deformation in the mesh. for instance, take the foot, parent it to the lower leg, parent the lower leg to the knee joint, and keep on going up... basically you'll be using fk (forward kinematics) for the whole thing and it'll take a while to animate, but from what i know it's really the only way to do it without any deformations at all.


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# 3 12-01-2007 , 07:53 PM
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Join Date: Dec 2006
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dammit! of course user added image

thankyou, I knew there should be a simple solution

# 4 13-01-2007 , 04:09 AM
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Join Date: Dec 2004
Posts: 33
Rigid bind might do what you want. You could, for example, select all the geometry for the head, and the head bone, and do a rigid bind to the selected joints. Thats what I did for my robot model.

Rigid bind is under skin->bind skin->rigid bind.

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