maya

Rigging: Basic Info

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  • Suffix and Prefix

After spending few years in animation industry in rigging and tech dept i have noticed naming conventions are really important, otherwise you are going to hell because definitely someone is going to curse you.

eg: “l_h_shldr_skn_jnt_01” can be used to filter names in the scene file which reduces the time in selection of joints from outliner for skinning *_skn*

  • Mirror muptiple joints

This is a situation we all face once where we sit for 20 to 30 mins and mirror joints, adjust and repeat, i faced this in my first job. I was going through some videos regarding facial rigging from Judd Simantov. He did something mindblowing mirrored multiple joints at once with the help of script.

import maya.cmds as cmds 
select_jnts = cmds.ls(sl=True) 
for x in select_jnts:
     cmds.mirrorJoint(x, mirrorYZ=True)
  • Orient Joints – Now mixing the above 2 points

All the riggers must be knowing the last joint in a joint chain, I use to name them Null joint

Null – Good for nothing joint

You can name anything you want but name all the last joints with a commom factor so that later you can select all of them with the help of wildcard “*_null*”

import maya.cmds as cmds 
select_end_jnts = cmds.ls(sl=True)
for x in select_end_jnts:
    cmds.setAttr("%s.jointOrientX"%x, 0)
    cmds.setAttr("%s.jointOrientY"%x, 0)
    cmds.setAttr("%s.jointOrientZ"%x, 0)

These are some pointers to those who are new to rigging and interested in scripting.

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