Between rigging - painting weights. - Simply Maya User Community

# 1 05-10-2012 , 05:54 PM

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Join Date: Oct 2012

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Between rigging - painting weights.

I'm fairly new to Maya. I have come quite far just working of some free u-tube tutorials and looking at infomation on these forums.

I'm just wondering - as I can't seem to find information on it - what the process is called of 'constraining' the range of motion of certain joints. I have binded my joints to the mesh and everything seems fine. From the looks of thing, I sort out the pinching problems by painting weights. That is very Clear...

What is not is how I, for example; prevent a leg going back futher than is humanly possible? More importantly, how to I constrain the neck from moving upwards till he looks like a giraffe.

Just the name of 'the process' so I can google it, or a link to a utube video that touches on the subject would be great.

Thanks

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# 2 05-10-2012 , 10:07 PM

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The process is known as joint limiting,look up "Setting up joints for posing and animation" in the Maya help files.

Joint Limit Information attributes specify the minimum and maximum translation, rotation, and scaling values for a joint. You can set a joint’s limits if you want the joint to behave in a specific manner. For example, if you want to create an elbow joint for a human skeleton, you need to set its rotation limits so that it cannot rotate in X and Z, but can rotate only a specified amount in Y. Alternately, you can turn off transformation channels or use Set Driven keys to restrict the transformations of an object.

If you are using IK to pose your joints, you may want to set the degrees of freedom for your joints. The Degrees of freedom tool setting determines which local axes the joints can rotate around during IK posing and animation. You can set the degrees of freedom for a joint from the Joint section of the joint node attributes.

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# 3 06-10-2012 , 12:09 AM

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I know it's tempting to do this, but animators hate having their controls limited. In many shots you'll need to "push" the joints to make the silhouette read better. It comes down to the "Doctor, when I poke myself in the eye, it hurts" thing. Just don't poke yourself in the eye then user added image

Imagination is more important than knowledge.

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# 4 06-10-2012 , 04:53 AM

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Following on from what NextDesign mentioned.... classic 2D animators quite often used to break the joints when animating walks and runs and sometimes to really extreme angles but it still worked.

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# 5 07-10-2012 , 04:28 AM

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don't poke yourself in the eye then, haha. By that phrase alone, I understood what you meant.

The thought had crossed my mind when posting this and the memory I have from watching behind the scenes of 2d Disney classics. As you say they would go beyond what was phycially possible slightly to sell it.

I think I will look into what jsprogg has said and set my limitations quite low, so I can still push it just a little past realism but not too much.

Thanks so much for your help, both of you.

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Between rigging - painting weights.

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