maya how to make a simple IK rig

maya how to make a simple IK 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 HumanIK and mocap

maya HumanIK and mocap

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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Making hair styles fur using Maya

In honor of Pixar's new film coming up as well as fulfilling some educational requirements, I have decided to delve into the world of Hair and Fur in Maya 2012 (although many of the principles should translate to other versions of the software as well).

What is the difference between hair and fur in Maya?
Fur is easy to style and direct the look of, yet has no real dynamics applications.
Hair does not render very well and is a bit of a bear to control stylistically, but works quite well with dynamics.
Using a Fur to Hair workflow, we can use the best of both approaches.

I will be attempting to re-create the feel of the curly red hair featured in Brave but, as this effect was achieved using Pixar's proprietary software and rendered in Renderman (neither of which many people have access to), I will be attempting this with Maya 2012 and render it in Mental Ray.

I'll start off with a basic head shape; I just exported the default head shape from Mudbox to Maya. Put this head on a display layer, duplicate it, then put the second identical head on another display layer. I have named these layers Scalp and FullHead. On your Scalp display layer geometry, delete all the faces that will NOT have your hair on them in order to make sort of a hair cap. Reduce this cap in size is it is just barely smaller than your original FullHead geometry.

Before applying Fur to this scalp of ours, it is important to make sure that the Maya Fur plugin is loaded. Navigate to the Plug-in Manager, and check the Loaded box next to Fur.mll

 

 

Set up a lighting scheme before continuing, otherwise Maya will helpfully(?) generate a directional light when you create your first fur. I put my light rig on another display layer.

Select your Scalp and navigate to the Rendering drop down menu on the top left of the screen. This will display the Fur options on the top bar. Select Fur, Attach Fur Description, and New.

Select your FurDescription1, these are the options for fine-tuning and controlling the look of your hair. Currently our head looks like a balding porcupine with very little personality.

Looking at our Scottish(?) princess, we see that her hair is not a single color but rather, fluctuates depending on how the light interacts with it. We can force this concept by changing the Base Color and Tip Color to match her more closely. Whatever you do, don't play with the ambient colors as it will throw off the entire lighting scheme of your scene. If you MUST use any kind of ambience, make it the very last thing you do in the shot.

In order to better see how this is affecting the fur, pump the Density to 10000.
I have also changed the Specular Color to better match the picture as well as upping the Length to about 9.

By playing with the Inclination, Roll, and Polar, I have further positioned the fur, yet it is still not behaving in the way the hair in the photo from Brave is.

From here, adjusting the UV's of your scalp geometry will give you even more control.
Navigate to the UV Texture Editor.

The UVs, as automatically set up by Maya, do not make good use of space. Rearrange them in order to better control the hair and fill up the UV box.

In order to get the head looking less like a porcupine and more like hair, lower the Tip Opacity and Tip Width while raising the Base Width. Granted she's still looking like a scene kid, but this is much closer to looking like human hair rather than spiked polygons.

By playing with Base Curl, Tip Curl, Scraggle (controls how much fluctuation there is in each bit of hair), Scraggle Correlation, Clumping (bands hair together into liberty spikes), Clumping Frequency (lets you unspike the liberty spikes while keeping the basic clump shapes), and Attraction (how closely the clumps, clump).

You may want to adjust the Segments option but just know that this is akin to the Mesh, Smooth tool and will raise the render time quite a bit.

Here are my settings so far.

The result is quite a bit closer to what I had in mind but is still strangely emo and quite too short. In order to add a random feel to ANY of these parameters, click the Details dropdown and change the amplitude and/or frequency of the attribute desired. This goes a long way towards attaining a natural look.

I usually apply a certain amount of randomness to the Base Color, Tip Color, Specular Color, Length, Base Width, and Scraggle.

After adjusting the length again, I'm going to want to fully fix the way the hair is laying across the scalp. We can do this using the Paint Fur Attributes Tool.

 

Don't paint using the Direction option as it is a combination of several options and can limit the actual amount of control you have. In order to better manipulate the flow of the hair, paint the Inclination, Roll, and Polar options.

It is not perfect but, given the limitations of the software, this will do fine for our purposes.
Fur can be kind of tricky to pull good shadows out of in Maya, notice how uniform and hard the shadows of the individual hairs are on the base of our mesh's chest. Select the light giving off the shadows. In the Fur menu navigate to Fur Shadowing Attributes and Add to Selected Light.

Next up is the task of creating a Maya Hair system that will drive the dynamics of our Fur!
Select the mesh you want the Hair attached to (in my case I used the scalp that the fur was attached to as well) and switch the dropdown menu on the top left to Dynamics. Select the square button next to Create Hair in the Hair menu.

Change the Output to Paint Effects and NURBS curves and then Create Hairs.

This will create some strange spikes atop your mesh. If you hit play at the bottom right of the screen, you will see them fall and sway quite like hair tends to do when a person reaches the bottom of a hill on a roller-coaster. I upped the number of frames in order to better see the simulation. Notice how the hair tends to penetrate the scalp when it sways...we will fix this later.

Let's attack the Hair we just created to our carefully styled Fur. Select Window, Relationship Editors, and then Hair/Fur Linking.

In the resulting pop-up window, both your hair system and fur description should be shown. Select them both and you will see the image on your viewport change, signifying the link between the two.

Now to make the hair collide with the head rather than cut through it.
Next select Hair, Create Constraint, then Collide Sphere.

I had to go into wireframe mode in my viewport to see the resulting Collide Sphere, but once found, resize it to match the basic shape of your head.

Select Hair, Display then Current Position.

Reset the simulation and watch it again, it should collide with the head better this time around! When the hair is relaxed and no longer bouncing around, pause the simulation and select all of your hair curves, then Hair, Set Start Position, and From Current.

That's pretty much all there is to it, I rendered mine with the visibility on the Hair itself turned off to just show the fur. It's quick and dirty, but the fundamentals are there! Part of the problem with this render is that while the Hair is respecting the boundaries set up, some of the Fur started inside the head due to it's hard-to-control curly nature...thus it treats the boundary that the Hair is abiding by as a relative notion.

So for the future, make sure no Fur is inside the head before moving on to the Hair stage!

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How to link two different rigs in maya

How to link two different rigs in maya 

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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