Maya Animation :: Parented Objects Deforming On Rotation?
Feb 19, 2012
I used to be able to create quick a makeshift skeleton for things like robots by parenting the objects that make up the robot to each other hierarchically. But the past few times I've tried to do the same thing, the child objects deform in weird ways when I rotate the parent. I looked and found a few references to this in forums, but not a single solution. The idea of going through and setting up either a proper skeleton, or parenting everything to group objects seems unnecessarily complex and frustrating when there was a simple solution before.
I'm having a deformation problem with clusters. Basically, the clusters are deforming the object which they are parented to. I've checked "relative" for each cluster under the attribute editor.
Regarding hierarchies, the above is the last iteration I have tried. Before that, I tried parenting the clusters to curves first then parenting the curves to a master control. The object was also parented to the master control.
I've tried maya default of grouping individual clusters first then parenting them to either the object or the master control, but the same results are achieved.
Please see the video below.
At one point the clusters were behaving as required, but I can't reproduce the results. I was going to animate the CVs, but parenting the curve to geometry or control presents problems of its own.
I have a Guitarfretboard that is build of 3 groups.(as in the pic)
What i want to do is create kind of a "stairway to heaven". So i would need to deform the whole group and make twirls and ups and downs, like a railcoaster.
The best way that i found to do that is to set a lattice on the group. But then when I deform the lattice points the single groups wont hold together anymore and start to seperate and mess up.
When setting up a simple FK control curve on say the wrist for example, many times the control curve isn't exactly perpendicular to the local rotation axis of the joint movement, so when we position the control curve to be perpendicular to the joint - it has a rotational value added, but the rotational handles are lines up with the rotational handles of the joint that we want to move.
Freeze Transformations: then the control curves rotational handle go back to being skewed (out of alignment with the joints)
We want to Freeze transformations before constraining the curve, but we'd really to keep those rotations control handles to remain aligned with the joints rotational handles. This will make it an exact control when animating - grab the rotational handle of the curve, rotate it, and the joint will move exactly in the proper direction.
how to get the rotational handle of any control curve to run perpendicular to the shape after freezing transformations?
I set up SDKs on my character's fingers. Everything was working fine. Fingers rotated properly from the open hand "0" position to a closed fist at the "10" position. I have the hand set up as the Driver and the fingers as the driven.
I then wanted my IK arm to work in FK, so I went into my attribute editor for IK pole vector constraint and checked on "IK/FK Control". I did a few rotations of the elbow joint and everything seemed fine.
I then went back to do some work on my hand, and when I when to change the values in my channel box to get the hand to clench, the fingers did not rotate into a fist, but rather went in all directions.
I can get the hand to work correctly intermittently (when I go back to the bind pose), so I know the correct rotation information is there. I have tried deleting history and making sure translations are not set on the hand. Would this be a gimbal or a local vs. global orientation problem?
Also, a side question: I noticed that when I built the SDKs for the fingers, I had numerous "blendWeights" created. Are these weights involved with moving the fingers between the minimum and the maximum values you set in the SDK set-up process?
I have an object that I want to rotate different.... not sure how to explain, it, but you can tell what I want by looking at the screenshot attached. I want the rotate to align with the cylinder. I've tried reset transformations, and the home key to move the pivot. I've also tried the different settings for the rotate settings and nothing is changing this angle. Is there a way to manually set this?
I am animating a ball right now, that is rolling all over the place. Would be cool to animate just the translation of an object and not to worry about rotation. Is there a way? Like.. through the expressions or set driven key? Also would be even better if rotation speed increased as the movement speed did.
For some reason some of the joints in my character rig are displaying their local rotation axis and I am unable to turn them off. The usual Display>Transform Display>Local Rotation Axis doesn't do it. This doesn't apply to all joints, just some. This is very frustrating as it causes real clutter when rigging.
I am busy working on rigging a character ( See attachment) to the best of my abilities and am running into some issues:
I have made a nurbs curve object which I intend to use as a controller in my rig, I have however modeled my character with his arms in a 45 degree angle so I snapped this particular object to the wrist and aligned it with the geometry...here comes the fun part , because it is a controller I wanted to have a clean channelbox zo I froze transformations which neatly sets every channel to 0, it also snaps the local axis to a world pivot orientation....
I went in componentmode pressed the question mark thingy and thought it was working..but it still alters the values in the channelbox.
I basically want the same rotation axes editing capabilities as I have with joints, I will try fiddling with that next, but I can't believe that this can't be solved any simpler.
When I set up the Image based lighting in Mental Ray, and key the dome that is created to rotate in a animation, it is clearly rotating in the viewport, and when I render individual frames, it works, but when I batch render (confirming that the render range is set correctly) it renders each frame with the dome in the same position.
I am having trouble with setting rotation to other then linear for the IK Controls, the FKs work fine. Is this some limitation, or option that I am missing ? Also, the keys are displayed as diamonds instead of the usual squares, so I guess there is some lock which I cannot find.
So perhaps I'm missing something blindingly obvious, but in previous versions of Maya, I've been able to simply hit F8 and check the '?' icon to be able to go in and individually rotate Local Rotation Axis to be the way I want.
For some reason I cannot find how to do this now in 2011? I've only been able to do them using the auto-tool.
Looking for the steps I need to take to be able to manipulate the local rotation axis individually as I have in the past now?
1. Windows/Animation Editors/HumanIK/Skeleton Generator - Generate Skeleton 2. Create control rig for it. 3. Set keys to rotate shoulder down and back.
Keys are linear by default and cannot be changed, except to "stepped". Clicking Spline, Auto, etc. Doesn't change anything. Works fine on translation curves. URL....I accidentally check the "force FIK curves to linear" button? It's totally killing our animation pipeline.
My current goal is to specify the rotation and translation of an object using a text file full of numbers. I have been told that I should import a "move" file. However, I can't seem to find any kind of reference about the move file format or how to use it. I see in the import dialog box that there is a file type called "move" but I don't know how to format the data that I put into the "move" file.
Also, I tried to export a "move" file so I could take a look at what Maya generates, but I keep getting the error "// Error: Could not save file "C:/My Documents/maya/projects/body_in_ocean/scenes/examplemove.mov".
I created a group with my object in one file, referenced it in my working file, moved the group around and set some keys in the working file, but I can't seem to export any move data. How to get this to work?
I have a simple head rig that I am working with (chest, neck, and head bones) that I can't get to deform correctly. It is a very high poly model (tris) because I imported it in from Leonar3Do so the skinning was very basic.
Anyway, I linked the eyes to the head bone and when I move the head bone the eyes follow it correctly but the mesh deforms very slightly so as to keep the eyes from being lined up with their sockets. I can provide the file if need be.
is there a way (probably a pluging) to deform a 2d picture in a 3d mesh? I work with virtual shoes, so I need to scan fabrics and apply them to shoes, but I want to deform the fabrics to make them look more realistic.
I made a Robotic arm whose function was to pick a dropper from a beaker and pour the droplets in another beaker from the dropper and then place the dropper back into the first beaker.
I used combine to attach the dropper with the robotic arm; everything worked well but when i placed the dropper back into the first beaker and rotated the arm back to its original position all the groupped objects got scattered ...
Got a bit of a puzzle here, trying to animate a cylinder deforming along a path. Fairly standard stuff. Got the path deform fine, but now I need any of the vertices that enter this one area to be deleted. Volume select with a mesh object doesn't seem to work, as it will only select the vertices where the cylinder is before the path deform object. Is there any sort of work around/way to collapse the animation of the path deform? I know I could do snapshot if I only wanted one frame of it, but the cylinder moves along the path over 1500 frames.
There is no motion in my meshes when using set key or auto key.
So lets say I have a cube and set a keyframe at 1 and move it a little to the right and set a keyframe at 13, between 1 and 13 there's no motion from 1 to 13, just it jumping straight to 13. I hope that makes sense, I've tired going to Animate setkey options and checked current manipulator handle, didn't worked.
I´d like to know how to move/displace multiple objects (in this case bricks) like it is done in this animation (at approx. 0:15 sec) [URL].I tried to reconstruct the effect using bigger bricks and tangent constraints, which worked kinda ok but I had to constrain every single brick manually which was rather time consuming and definitely not the approach they must have had used. Is there a way to achieve similar effect (pref. without scripting)?
I'm rigging a character for use in Maya 2011, which I'm not all too familiar with - How would I link the blend shape states for 2 objects, so when I increase the value of one blend shape for one object, it increases the value for another blend shape for another object?
I have a blend shape for the mouth open position & I need the teeth & tongue open blends to match as the value increases.
In 3DS Max I'd use the reaction manager - is there something similar for Maya?
I have a character who is wearing a vest with buckles on the side. Binding with skin weights creates distortion of these buckles, so it's not a good solution. So I'm experimenting with Duncan's Parent To Surface script: . It seemed to work ok until I noticed that when my character bent forward or backward the buckle di...
In the timeline panel in CS6 EXTENDED, you have a video feature, where you can animate three things:
Position Style Opacity
What I would like to know, is: How can I animate rotation of a layer? I want to rotate my layer at an angle and animate it. But when I rotate, the first animation frame is also rotated, resulting in NO animation between the frames.
I have rigged a character and made it into a character set in which i have locked the scaling attribute , I have then saved this file. I have then referenced this file and and have done a walk cycle animation and saved this file. I have then realised that I needed the scaling attribute when I have added other parts of my scene. Is there a way to unlock the scaling attribute in my walk cycle animation file or will i have to go back and change it in the rigged file, create a new character set and do the walk cycle animation again?
My current scene has 10 animation layers for a character, and seeing every f-curve from all layers, although grey and locked, when I only need to see the f-curves in layer I'm working on is really cluttering the graph editor. My current work around is selecting my active layer in the Layer Editor every time I select a rig control. Simple enough, but a pretty inefficient way of working. I can't seem to find a setting that allows me to just see ONLY the fcurves in the active layer. I imagine some of you out there may have hundreds of animations for a single game character.
I'm trying to animate a moving rope based on simulation data. I know how to import my motion data for individual objects.I've seen lots of tutorials where one uses simulations or soft bodies with IK in order to create a rope. how to use all these features and I want the rope to follow my coordinates exactly. I was hoping I could do something like the following:
1. create points in Maya which correspond to my data points 2. connect the points with a curve 3. loft a circle using the curve as a path in order to make a rope 4. move the points. due to History, the rope position is updated
Is there a way to do something like this in Maya? I've tried, and it looks like ep points do not have key-able channel data, so I can't create animations for them separately. I'm using .mov data file imports to generate x, y, and z motion keys for the points.
