how to scale a rig?
polycounter lvl 8
we've got a custom arm rig consisting of bones and various helpers, and we need to scale it linearly to match real-life size (currently its around 20cm long)
does anyone have any idea how we can do that? (all scale values need to be reset to 100 before exporting because the exporter doesnt support != 100 values).
does anyone have any idea how we can do that? (all scale values need to be reset to 100 before exporting because the exporter doesnt support != 100 values).
Replies
Also, what are you using? Max/Maya?
also we do have some animations already made, so preserving those would be a huge plus (although I think if we export the anims from the old rig and re-import them in to the linearly scaled rig it should work right?)
the problem is that I cant just select everything and use the scale tool to enlarge the whole rig, so what am i supposed to do?
edit: just to elaborate a bit, the rig consists of the bones and the mesh which is skinned to the bones. The reason we want to scale it is because the rig (although mainly to be used for first person animations) will sometimes interact with world-objects, and currently it looks really dumb when tiny 20cm long hands grab a huge life-sized weapon from the ground.
When I've scaled rigs it's usually ended in me un-linking everything, scaling, and then resetting the xform, then re-linking. You can preserve skin information with "SkinUtilities" but if the mesh/bones you're wanting to change have any animation on ... say goodbye to it!
Or wait for someone else to come a long with a better idea.
Edit
Hang on, I'm remembering something about freezing transforms, and resetting transforms too? Shit, sorry... it's been a long time since I've had to deal with dodgy/wrongly scaled rigs.
I figured out that by scaling the root dummy and some other helpers linearly scales the whole rig. It also leaves the bone's transforms at 100, so i dont have to reset them (thank god).
I've replaced the scaled helpers with new ones that have no scaling, so that part is all good now.
I've tried re-skinning the meshes using .env files that I exported before scaling, but that doesnt seem to be working very well.
Ill try find out more about this SkinUtilities thing if that should work
losing animation data is a bummer but we can handle it.
It basically spits out a duplicate "Skin Data" of your mesh, which you then use to put the skin info back on after making changes. I don't know if I've ever used it with scaling rigs actually... use at your own risk! The help file has info on it... but it might be quicker to hunt down a youtube clip or something.
I make sure that each mesh piece shares the same pivot point which makes scaling much easier. I like to put this pivot point at the lowest center point of the character, so the character scales up from the feet, not out from the center. I then move that pivot to the scene 0 0 0 spot and then set the rig's root node to be in exactly the same spot. That way everything scales from the same point.
With CAT you use the Main Menu > Animations > Animation CAT > Rig Resizer, I only use it on the CAT pieces and scale the meshes independently. Bake and save out the skin weights, save out the animation. Using the rig resizer you can use the same scale that you applied to the mesh making them match exactly.
With biped bake and save skin weights, delete skin, scale the mesh first, then with the biped in figure model I adjust the height to match, which isn't as precise as the CAT rig-resizer but in the cases where precision is key I will attach a point helper to the surface of the mesh and put it on a specific point where the rig pokes through the mesh (before scaling anything). When the points align again they are the same size. Still not an exact match but close enough that it won't effect anything.
Then you can load in whatever animation you had before. With CAT and Biped the rig scale doesn't matter you can load any motion onto the current rigs and the animation will conform to the rig, unless you force it to conform to the "incoming rig".
I am probably forgetting that one crucial step, though.
EDIT : and yeah, at this point i'm really just rehashing what others have said. move along sir.
now i just got to get cracki'n and re-do all the animations :P
Id advise that you never directly animate your deformation rig. if you build it from a simple bone hierarchy and constrain it to an animation rig you get a layer of abstraction that can save you having to redo animations in this situation or save you reskinning if you need to make changes to the animation rig.