For our second project we have been assigned the task of rigging a pair of legs, we have been given some very basic legs to rig by Mark. We have also been required to perform some basic animation to show that the rig works correctly.
To begin with I opened up the obj.file and placed the basic legs into the world of Maya, they had already been placed into the centre so no need to edit there position. To start creating the joints that make the leg I needed to be in a far better veiw so I changed perspective into the side veiw, this allowed me to get the correct position of the joints starting with the hip, knee, ankle, ball and finally the toe.
After I had placed the joints in the correct place it was time to check the joints were perfoming the correct movements and moving in right axis, this is mainly for the knee joint, otherwise the knee would flex backwards instead of forwards. When I was happy with this i ment into joint hierachy chart and named all the joints e.g. Hip_L etc. This way when it came to copying the leg I could easliy create it just by searching the existing joints.
After I had ensured that this was correct it was time to copy the skeleton for the second leg, by achieving this you just select the joints and mirror them in the skeleton menu but making sure to change the axis, also because I had named them well and had it all sorted out I could just search to copy the joints as I explained earlier.
Once the left leg had been copied it was time to bind the skin to the skeleton. This will then make the skeleton part of the skin and have an effect on the mesh when it moves making it look like a pair of real legs. I also had to add a basic tip of the spine to connect the hips.
The last part to sort out was the IK handles and reverse footlock. These tools will help create the correct movements later on when I go to animate the legs. To create the handles you need to connect the IK handles to the ankle from the hip, this makes the knee bend in the correct way.
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