I've got a piece of geo that I need to parent some lights to. However, the geo is not animated, it has a muscle system skin deformer on it and the skin deformer is reading an external muscle cache file.
Since the geo isn't animated, parenting the lights to the geo doesn't seem to work. how to parent the lights to one of the vertices on the piece of geo?
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...
View 3 Replies View RelatedI just installed the latest 2013.5 Extension release. When trying to perform a load saved weights from the Muscle menu, I receive the following error when switching the Load By type to World Pos.
// Error: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2013.5/scripts/muscle/cMuscleSaveWeights.mel line 663: Object 'tfTol' not found. //
Any way to do the skin conversion to muscle system WITHOUT converting every single joint to a polygon bone object. I'd prefer to manually create the muscle bone objects from only the joints I plan to use for the muscle system, and then do the skin conversion using only those joints already converted. Basically, I only need a few muscles in this system and therefore only need a few polygon bone objects, but as far I can tell, there is only one way to do the skin conversion and it automatically converts every joint that the skin is attached to.
View 5 Replies View RelatedI 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?
View 2 Replies View RelatedMy 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.
View 4 Replies View RelatedI'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.
I have an assignment for a class where part of the final project is detailing the construction of a mold for a part. The animation that I would like to do would show the build up of the part in a 3D printer layer by layer. The closest method of animating this that I can think of is unfortunately backwards.
As I would have the part and a camera facing up from the bottom of the part and would have a plane that would recede upwards in the y direction. This would reveal the part as the plane translates in the y direction.
This might be okay, but the problem is that I would like to show this from a camera on top facing down instead of a camera on bottom facing up. How I can create the look of a part being built up in this additive method?
I am trying to add an expression to the standard Mudbox car to make the wheels turn when the vehicle moves in both the X & Z dimension. I have found many scripts that let me do this in a single dimension. I have found some others that claim to work for both dimensions, but at certain angles the wheels turn in the wrong direction.
My work flow is as follows:
1 - Export car from Mudbox to Maya
2 - Separate the wheels & center pivot all items
3 - Add NurbsCurves to create a rig
4 - Parenting the elements of the car
5 - Add an expression based on this web post [URL].......
6 - Test the animation
It works great when translating the car in the Z axis, but when the car is rotated 95 degrees in the Y axis the wheel will only go backwards no matter which direction the car is moved.
I have attached an MB (Maya 2013) so you can see the
problem.mudboxcar_maya_2plusexpression.mb.zip
translate facial motion capturing data (basically 2d point clouds) to blendshape weights. I finished rigging my character and wanted to drive my blendshapes by the relative position of my tracking data, e.g. distance between corners of the mouth drive the "wide" blendshape and so on...
Hope YOU know a solution for this, I believe blendshapes are THE way to create realism in tracked animation but I was not able to find ANY reference to something like that. I'd like it to be customizable and not to expensive, so the imagemetrics faceware service won't do for me
How come baking some part of animation in graph editor deletes everything before and after the part i bake and how can i bake that part while leaving the rest untouched?
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have a character with animation. Another character is the same(same bones, meshes), but with no animation, 100 times larger in size and I resize the head to make the head looks slimmer. They are saved in different fbx files and I imported them into mb scenes. I select the root bone and "select hierarchy", the export options is shown below. Then select in the same way in the larger character's scene, the importer options is shown below. THE PROBLEM is: after I import the atom, the character becomes shrinked to the same size as the former one and the ratio of head becomes the same as the former one too.
View 1 Replies View RelatedFor some scenes we have a chain which is wrapped around several cogs, just like a bicycle. In this scenario we need the chain links to follow the path and retain their relationship to each other.
In other scenes we have a chain which follows along a changing path. Imagine this if you can: A heavy weight has a chain attached which goes vertically up, over a pulley and down the other side where it is attached to a lorry. The lorry drives off pulling the weight upwards. This is my challenge!
Should I individually constrain the links using a Pin constraint and use dynamics completely to keep the chain taught?
Was wondering if there is a way of getting random camera movements? For example, i am doing a fly through of an earthquake scene and as the camera animates along the street it randomly shakes with the earthquake shocks.
I know I could animate it by hand but I wondered if there was a way (perhaps an expression) to make it more simple?
I have made a 3d Spectrum analyser , its made of rectangular boxes 16 rows and 16 boxes in each row.
So i have made my cam from Bottom Left corner to Top Right over 96 Frames.
What i need to do, is make some of the blocks disappear and re appear as the cam pans across.
In sketchup i did it by HIDEING the component (block), make new scene, then un hide it..
I want to key frame animate something to go in a straight line but it seems to start out slowly, speed up, and then slow down again at the end. Is there a way to make it so the object moves the same speed throughout?
View 1 Replies View RelatedI have an animation layer that I have exported and Im trying to import it into a new file and then merge it down to the base layer.
what ends up happening is that when I do the merge i get two additional layers. and the layer with the animation stays there. and nothing gets baked. the animation stays in the imported layer.
I should be able to import/export animation layers right?
[URL]........
I have a image plane. I would like to move the image of the plane in animation. It looks out then masking. I need only some parts of the image in frame one, and I need other parts of the image on frame 100. The plane isn't moving, only the image is moving in the box.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI am working on a school assignment where we are to use mocap for character animation...well av gone that far but, now I need to edit the animation to fit better in my animation......below is a playblast of what I have now..i need to have my characters holding onto the broom....
[URL].......
heres also a screenshot.
Using Maya 20121 and Motionbuilder 2012
I've been working on an animation for a week or two and all of the sudden the file no longer plays the animation. The keyframes are there and I can scrub through them, but when I hit play it just hangs on the frame it's already on, it says it's playing (The icon changes to stop and in the corner it says "Hit ESC to stop playing", but nothing moves. I can bring it into older versions of Maya and it plays, but the only other version of Maya I have is 2008 and it doesn't like the transfer from 2011 to 2008.
View 2 Replies View Relatedi'm actually starting to design and code the animation part of the pipeline for my studio. So if you have a given shot in a given version, you have a bunch of animations for all characters/props, and you can publish a version of your animation and rollback your animation to older versions.I have two kinds animations exported : one "normal" and a geocache version also. For the geocache, I use Alembic and for the moment I'm pretty happy with the results.
For the "normal" version, i was thinking of using animImportExport module from maya. It seems to work fine, but then comes THE issue I remember having to discuss for hours in all the studios I've worked : what about the constraints?i have my character, for example Ogre_chr (group node) and i export all anim below that node and call it Ogre_chr_Shot101_v01.anim. But if there's a constraint outside the ogre, it won't be exported. I could take the anim of the object that is constraining and add it to my .anim, but imagine two characters interact with one same constraint : saving versions of both characters will cause issues when you play around with loading different versions of both characters.
how to create a vacuum sucking animation?
What I need to do is suck little strands of something I made into/thru a hollow a needle.
When I key the arm on frame 1 for instance, then key the hip they both appear on the same frame, meaning if I copy the arm to frame 20, it copies the hip too.Or if I want to adjust the arm on frame 10 it also adjusts the hip (and all the other frames in the scene.)Making it practically impossible to tween anything at all because it's all lumped together.
I deleted my entire walk cycle and started over again, reset the options to default, reloaded Maya... and it's still happening but only in this scene.
As I am setting the driven successfully in Maya 2011, and when i am animating the driven controller by using the attribute, the animnation is snapping to the default driven value, to max. driven value, and to min. driven value, So, i can't the see the in-betweeings between to keys.
View 2 Replies View RelatedI have more than ten thousand photos on an external harddisk. When I travel I prefer to leave the external harddisk at home and just use the previews of Lightroom. However, only some photos display well without the attached harddisk. The rest are very pixelated.
Is there any way to make sure all photos have properly cached previews?
(I'm fairly new to trying to using Lightroom for anything useful, even though I have played with it every now and then for several years. Tools I know better are Aperture and Photoshop and ACR.)
I am trying to cache some exr files and for some reason Smoke can´t read the files:
Using the media hub I am able to view the exr file and can work with them as long as I don´t cache them. As soon as I cache them they are black and I get the message "unable to read media"
Is this some known bug? Backburner works perfectly (after tweaking some things with Mikes great tutorial), I can cache other files but not these exrs.
I'm basically trying to create an image of the human body anatomy with all the muscles and the fibers. How to create these fibers. I have already created the shapes of some of the muscles but now when it comes to creating these fibers, I can't think of what to do. I've already tried the filters > fiber but the result wasn't what I required.
Below is an image similar to what i'm trying to recreate.
I have noticed that a file is xrefed much faster if the file has been opened at some point. (Wtih the file I tested with it was 45 sec vs 1,5 sec) This must mean that the file is cached and can very quickly opened later if it has been opened.
I have an application that xref other files as overlay xref's. This is very slow since the xrefed files haven't been opened. And it will be this slow every time i xref them since they are never opened. Is there a way I can cache the files manually or something like that?
I found a toy which is belong to my brother's son in my grandmother' house. It is a Fire engines, and it has a adjustable Fire ladder，then I want build this things with maya, so ......the modeling is done, and then the problem comes out when I ready to rig the fire ladder, look at the pic below, let me explain:
1.there are three axle in red : A B C , blue things is base of axle
2.the green thing is the fire ladder
3.the yellow thing is a hydraulic push-rod which can be adjustable
4.the pink thing looks like a Skateboard, and hydraulic push-rod base on it.
5.the gray thing is a part of fire engines' body.
there is no problem if it has a fixed pole instead hydraulic push-rod, because I can just use a IK handle link A & C, but now....it doesn't work.
I've been getting my hands on a few models from different games (Such as the Spy from 'Team Fortress 2', and Mario from 'Super Smash Brothers Brawl') lately, all of which are already weighted properly... So I can simply apply IK's and begin animating in a matter of minutes...
However, I can't set up any of them with a HIK rig (To use with Motion Capture..).. I keep getting an "Invalid skeleton or no skeleton. Can't create new rig." error when trying to Create the HIK Rig (I can Characterize the skeleton with no problem though). I know that the mesh is binded already to the skeleton using skin clusters..
I have 3+ Nurbs Circles that I have parented up in a hierarchy and now want to use them to create an IK chain.I can create a chain with a joint system, but can I create it with just my curves? I have tried using the IK handle tool and it requests that I LMB on the first joint and nothing happens.
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