Rigging in Maya - Mini joints and Non-Zero rotations

Philly13

Hey guys, just on a break at work and thought I'd post up a quick problem I was having

Firstly, I'm quite new to character rigging and working with a training series from Digital tutors on next-gen games characters in Maya. I've run into some trouble when trying to orient my joints - when I use the orient joint tool, certain joints receive the error about non-zero rotations (e.g. "Warning: Skipping LeftShoulder: It has non-zero rotations.")

Also my joints are turning out really small when I add new ones to the chain like in the following pic, and I'd rather they are the same size as the original joints I created.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v...innx/LegRig.jpg

Any advice is appreciated, thanks in advance

kodde

You can change the scale of all the joints in the scene with Display > Animation > Joints Size. Or you can change the Radius attribute of a single joint to resize it individually.

Non-zero rotations is just what it sounds like. You have been rotating your joints and therefor Maya can't orient them for you. A quick way to solve this would be for you to select your root joint (probably pelvis), right click and select Assume Preferred Angle.
If that doesn't work, select your root joint and then go to Edit > Select Hierarchy, then in your channel box on the right side of your screen write 0 in all the rotation values.

ivars

Better yet, freeze transformations on your joints. That way they will have zero rotations but stay in the current position.

kodde

I usually make one trashCopy of my skeleton first where I go nuts with translating and rotating joints. Add it to a new layer and set it to reference. Then I create a new joint system where I just snap the joints to the old joints positions.

Philly13

Thanks guys, appreciate the useful feedback The problem I'm having is a bit hard to explain - I'm at a stage where I'm trying to create an advanced twist on the cluster curve of the spine and have followed the instructions from the tutor quite well, although I'm experiencing different results.

I moved onto a later version of the file saved by the tutor so I don't get bogged down to much with one problem, although I'd like to find out why this problem is happening so I know how to tackle it later on with my own rigs (gotta learn sometime right? ) I think I'll go back and try to quickly setup the skeleton again to see if I missed anything.

Neavah

I don't want to sounds like a broken record but,
if the error message your getting says 'non zero rotations' then your bones have rotations, and thats the root cause of the problem.

on the note, if I do recall correctly (and it's been a long time, so I could be wrong), sometimes bones may have a -0 rotation or even a 0 rotation, and they still have rotate values, just really, really itty bitty ones, so it rounds it to zero. Easiest way to fix that is to select all the bones (each one) and type 0 in all the rotate slots.

Hope that helps!

Philly13

Cool info, thanks I've got another problem that I've come across, after smooth binding the rig to the model, the tutor opens the component editor in the smooth skins tab and has the visible joints and handles displayed, although in mine they don't appear at all. Is there an option I should have checked? I thought they might have appeared on his component editor because he'd selected the skeleton, but he hadn't selected anything, just opened the component editor.

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v338/Blinnx/Eh.jpg

Also, when the bones/handles do appear in the component editor, they are displayed horizontally but my component editor displays the layout vertically. Anyone know how to display the layout horizontally? Thanks once again! Hehe...

kodde

What is it you want to achieve in the component editor? I don't use it that often to recollect exactly how it's done. But I think you are supposed to select the components you want to manipulate, therefor the name "Component Editor".