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Changing Joint Orientation without breaking the rig

Hi guys,

I've got an issue with a rig at the moment that I just can't get my head around, hoping you guys can help me out smile.gif

I have a male and female character rig, both have got the same setup i.e. skeleton, skinned mesh and controls. However, there is a problem with the rig that I am trying to sort out and as I didn't originally make this rig it's quite hard to know what to do.

With the current orientation of the joints, X is pointing in the wrong direction, see image below:
https://app.box.com/s/k5lhsdxtsgizs44bio8c

So what i'm thinking of doing at the moment is:
1 - Save the weight of the skin
2 - Detach the skin
3 - Select each joint individually and select the joint constraint
4 - Delete the joint constraint
5 - Change the orientation
6 - Recreate the constraint as before
7 - Reload the weights that I saved.

The only problem I have with this procedure so far, is #4 and #6. I can't find what the joint is constraint to and I therefore won't be able to recreate the constraint later.

I've asked a previous rigger who worked on this rig (but he wasn't the first or the last person to alter it) and he said there is a puppet skeleton which controls the joints but I can't find that puppet skeleton. If I could, I could probably recreate the constraint.

I really appreciate the time you give for any help you can offer me. smile.gif

Thanks guys.

Replies

  • monster
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    monster polycounter
    Well if you are talking about position and orient constraints the name of the object it's constrained to is listed in the channel box after the offsets. Or you could open the Node Editor and click on the Input Connections button.

    But, the image you show is pretty bad. Somebody was too trigger happy with the Freeze Transform tool. Personally, I would save the skin weights using a script that saves them to a text file, delete the rig and the skeleton, and start over. If you use the same joint names you can load the skin weights without issue.
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