Maya - Animating both sides equally
polycounter lvl 9
Is there a way in Maya to get the opposite side of the characters rig be set into the same translate, rotation, etc. of the main side you're working on without inputting the values one-by-one?
Replies
Check the character mirror table script by Denny Lindberg. Not super easy, but it definetely works. http://dennylindberg.com/
Or you can use the HumanIK Rig, that has a built in mirroring, I think
In object space, you could cut and paste the channels from one side to another then offset the cuves in the graph editor by the right amount. It does depend how you set the rig up.
Another way is to create a dummy set of controls, point and orient them to the ones you want to copy, bake the anim on them, group them then scale by -1 in whatever axis you need to mirror then bake these to your controls.
In the node editor or hypershade, connect the translate of the ctrl you want to mirror (say the left shoulder) to a multiplydivide node(this is incase any value needs inverting but they shouldnt), make another multiply divide node for the rotation and plug their outputs into the right shoulder.
You could also add an attribute to a controller that turns this on and off, just use a blendcolors node with the attribute set to the blender and plug the outputs from the multiply divide nodes into it (then the blendcolors outputs into the right shoulder). You would have to set keys on both controllers tho. Anyways i suck at explaining things so i made a quick image for you of my node layout. The only value i changed to get it to work where on the blendcolors ( color 2 has a 1 attribute that needs to be 0 so no value gets outputted from the mirror switch is set to false). The multiply divide node i didnt touch so the input 2 values should all be 1 (if u need to invert anything then set it to the one u need to invert to minus 1)
This shouldn't be too hard to script either, i imagine you just get the xform from the left controller and mirror its values to the right.