Maya - How to rig suspenders?
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Hello polycount!
I'm rigging a character in Maya and having trouble when it comes to the suspenders. Originally I just skinned them to the body bones and weight painted those as well as I could, but while it stretched and contracted nicely it would shear badly when twisting.
I think the solution is to give the suspenders their own set of bones and to have that be driven by the body, that way they can bend smoothly. The problem is I'm not quite sure how to go about that. I would love to get an effect similar to this if I could. The effect looks great but unfortunately they didn't go into detail on how it was done.
I asked this question in the Maya forums and it was suggested I try closest point on surface nodes. I tried this solution but found it didn't really work, at least when I implemented it I found it performed worse than the original rig and was overly complex.
I looked into other methods and found this collar rig utilizing muscle keep out nodes. This is closer to what I want, it's simpler and more like having colliders without dynamics. I've made a test rig and while it performs better than the closestpoint solution it wasn't perfect and it had the disadvantage of not being able to contract, so it wouldn't always fit the shape of the deforming mesh underneath.
Does anyone know of a way to properly rig suspenders? I figured this is something that comes up a lot with game character rigging (harnesses/ammo belts/etc) so I was curious if there was a better way. I've attached an example scene for people to work with if you know of a solution that would work.