Maya Rigging Constraint Issue - Low Poly Dinosaur

Doran

Hey all, I have been trying to rig this dinosaur model I made for a little bit now and I am having an issue with the parenting and the constraints. When I try to parent the tail and the arms to the chest / body it breaks the constraints and warps the arms and tail. I included some screens below and was just hoping if someone knows of any issues / mistakes that can be made while doing this.

Bartalon

Unfrozen transforms on your controllers can often lead to strange behavior when transformed/parented.

.Wiki

Bartalon wrote: »

Unfrozen transforms on your controllers can often lead to strange behavior when transformed/parented.

Yep, just create a freeze transform null below every control. This will reset the controls transforms to zero.

Doran

Thanks for the help. If you guys mean the controllers I have them all frozen. So the positions in the first screen on every controller are 0 0 0 but when I parent for some reason it resets the transformation and trys to go to the center of the world.

Is there any chance that this is because the position on the actual IK's aren't frozen? The last rig I did it worked when I just froze the controllers.

Bartalon

In your images, the claw controllers appear to scale down in size after you parent them which makes me think there's still some strange scale transformation happening. Your scale needs to be frozen too, at 1 1 1.

I see this happening in your tail controller as well.

Doran

Yep I think that might have been the issue, thank you very much. For some reason Free Transformation was set to only freeze rotation and movement and not scale.

.Wiki

Doran wrote: »

Thanks for the help. If you guys mean the controllers I have them all frozen. So the positions in the first screen on every controller are 0 0 0 but when I parent for some reason it resets the transformation and trys to go to the center of the world.

Like i said in my first post, the easiest way to solve this is with a freeze transforms null.

As you can see the freeze has transforms, which are related to the global_srt null. The local transforms are zeroed out by the freeze null. These things are rigging basics.
The deformers, or call it "bones" are only constrained with pose constraints and got their own hierarchie.

If you just freeze the position of a null object it returns itself to the global zero position. Even if it "works" in some cases this would be a hacky workaround. And will cause your rig to become unstable.

Doran

/\ /\ /\ Thanks a bunch! Didn't know you could do that.