maya! how to turn characters?! :P

fx01

hey together ...

i started with rigging and anim 2 month ago or  so i may ask something stupid ;P
 .. but now i wanna create some turn animations ... 45* 90* and so on 

the problem! i seem to be bit banana or so ;P

the character is in some kind of attack pose on frame 0 which makes it hard for me to rotate it via the attributes .D that it matches the exact same pose just 45* / 90 / ...rotated without touching the root control 

the rig itself is a pretty simple ik/fk switch thingy using the ik for the legs in this case 

what would be the typical workflow to achieve this ?! 

greetings, 

KielFiggins

Hey FX01, turns and end poses are always a bit tricky.  One approach you can do is this:
-at frame 0, create a locator for each of your main controls (body, chest, hips, head, pole vectors and ik/fk)
-parentconstraint each locator to the control, be sure to uncheck 'maintain offset', then delete the constraint.  this should align the locator to the position and rotation of the control
-group all the locators and rotate that ground the amount of the turn, ie rotate y = 45
-now you know where your controls need to end up when you do your turn animation
-on the last frame of your turn animation you can parent constraint (without offset) the control to the locator to snap it to the right place, then delete the constraint
-now you should have a character turning in place, which is starting facing one direction and ending facing another
-now depending on the engine and export type, you'll need to counter animate the world control of the character to rotate the opposite way of the turn.  So if you animated your character turning 45 degrees, you'd animate the world control from 0 to -45 over the same frames.  This will give the look that your character is always facing relatively forward and the engine will turn the character.

Hope this helps.

Flynny

The above is a good tip.

Another method to keep in mind if the rig is complex or you end on ik but started with fk etc.. Grab the character mesh in its first pose, duplicate, take it out the hierarchy and place it where your final frame should be about.. then animate towards that goal and for the extra niceness use wireframe when matching up the animated character and the polygon mesh you duplicated I usually set it as template it really helps!

Hito

key the root with linear rotation, key your character's start pose, and key the end pose (they should be identical); animate the character over the root's rotation. once that's all done and looking good, delete the root's key frames. the root will remain still while character will turn half way and return to start pose facing forward with sliding feet... flip between first and last frame, nothing should move in the viewport, which is what you need before export.

fx01

hmhm definatly sounds like a plan

thank you guys!

greetings

antweiler

if you do a lot of animations that need to match a transfer pose at a different angle, i strongly recommend Red9 Studio Tools, its Pose Library has tools that help you with that. Its a bit overwhelming in the beginning, but extremely powerful and free!

http://red9-consultancy.blogspot.de/

fx01

thanks for sharing i will give it a try