Couple Of issues

MikeF

So i'm working on a robot style character for my 3d final project and i'm running into a few issues with the rigging, heres a breakdown.
Using maya 8.5 sp1 and advanced skeleton.

Since all of his joints are ball and sockets, i'm simply parenting each peice to its coresponding joint on the rig.
The only part of the model which requires a smooth bind is his neck->head>entenai.
I've gotten to the point where everything is parented apropriately, and my smooth bind is working, but when i go into the paint weights tool to adjust a few things nothing updates. I can paint it and everything looks fine, but as soon as i move onto the next joint i lose whatever was just changed....

Second problem:
He has a large camera lense in the center of his face with two aperture rings at the base, the rings spin when the lense moves in and out, the problem is that the lense cant be attached to the rest of the head prior to the smooth bind or else I loose the expression i've set up, and parenting it after the bind doesnt seem to work either.

any ideas?

jpaton

[ QUOTE ]

Second problem:
He has a large camera lense in the center of his face with two aperture rings at the base, the rings spin when the lense moves in and out, the problem is that the lense cant be attached to the rest of the head prior to the smooth bind or else I loose the expression i've set up, and parenting it after the bind doesnt seem to work either.

any ideas?

[/ QUOTE ]

constraints

(first problem i didn't really understand. it's a single mesh objects with bones? are you trying to skin more then one mesh at a time?)

MikeF

I managed to get pas the first one, but I'm still having issues with constraining the lens, I've tried parent and point constraints and neither of the seem to be working.

fogmann

Not sure why constraints wouldn't work. Make sure you do the selection in the correct order (constrained object needs to be selected last). Might also want to check the hypergraph to see your connections; if you get some weird cycling connections, things may break and not work as expected. So for example, if you get objects to move unexpectedly, you might have double transform, where, say, a joint rotation is transforming the object and on top of that a constraint or direct parenting is also affecting it. Parenting anything to bound geometry is not a good idea (or whatever you meant by attaching to the head), so only use your skeleton to hook together different parts.

MikeF

Managed to get it working, apparently there was an issue with the fact that the parent object in the parent constraint had a smooth bind.... Just parented to his face bone instead, thanks guys.