The Rigging/ muscle project ------------------------------------------Keith Legg DECEMBER 1, 2004

RELEASE V 1.75 download updated DEC 1, 2004

This is BETA!!!!

this includes the mucle scripts but ignore those for now

INSTALATION

put all the scripts into your path , either edit your maya.env path to accomodate the loctaion of the scripts, or put the scripts in C:\Program Files\Alias\Maya6.0\scripts\others

TO RUN THE SCRIPTS type source SetupMachine.launch.mel;

you will get a gui with two buttons

press GEN RIG (generate rig)

you will get the rigging window

the characters name is typed into the top field THIS IS IMPORTANT every thing for the character will be named with this name, this is also important for the mapping later

MAKE RIG - build s preview rig that has locators to postion for the final skeleton. It will still need to be "cleaned" , or mirrored, named , and the loctaors removed

MAKE HAND - this is a tool to add fingers- USE IN THE TOP VIEW, it has two locators, a base and a target see below for details

CLEAN RIG - removes red locators and mirros and names the skeleton

SETUP IK - makes ik handles on the wrists, feet, shoulders, and head. Also adds four pole vectors for the elbows and knees

MAKE_CHARSET - puts it all into a character set and a display layer

Make sure to not hit a button more than once, I have not put any error checking in and this will cause problems

this is BETA and not quite ready to use, the next week or two of my time is testing and fixing the most obvious problems which there are many

TUTORIAL

make sure your working units are set to FEET, not centimeters, inches etc

press the make rig button and a skeleton is built, postition the red locators to better match your skin mesh

*** BETA VERSION the rig is for biped characters that are about six feet high facing positive Z (this will be fixed in the next release )

*** BETA VERSION in the future you will be able to scale the green ring to globally scale the charater, this is halfway working but dont move things too drastically for now

when you are happy with the postiton, you can make a hand or skip it here is how to make a hand

switch to the top view

zoom into the hand area, press MAKE HAND

two locators and an arrow appear. you move the two locators to position the fingers. The big locator is the "BASE" to be moved to the base of a finger, the target is for the finger tips

the title of the window that popped up tells you which finger to edit

RESELECT - selects the base , or base of the finger loctaor

RESELECT_TARGET selects the taget , or fingertip locator

DONE builds the joint chain and starts the next finger until 5 times total for each finger

you can either select the locators in the view or press the select target button in the add finger window that popped up notive it will prompt you 5 times, one for each finger starting with the pinky working down to the thumb. The hand part is optional , you can rig a skeleton with or without hands

when you hit done a joint chain for the finger is built with the start where the base was and the end at the target. Also notice a locator is still positioned at the base to add final tweaks to (or to move on Y since we are looking top down ) Now the pop up window asks for the RING finger and so on until you add all five fingers

*** BETA VERSION the finger postition on the cleaned skeleton has some bugs the fingers may not end up in the right place

the finished hand

now you are ready to CLEAN the skeleton,

PRESS CLEAN and the skeleton is mirrored, named and ready to rig

now the rest is easy press SETUP_IK

all the handles are nurbs curves, there are wrists,feet, a shoulder rotation, a head control (UNFISHED) and toe rotations also four pole vector locators shown as larger diamonds

now to finish it up press MAKE_CHARSET

this does two things adds the character into a layer and makes a character set node for the character, you can now animate with TRAX or map to another character with the same name