Maya Rigging - Freezing rotation on controls

slipsius

Im trying to create hand controls, and I want to freeze all the controls attributes, but when I do that, all the local rotation axis go back to the world axis, instead of keeping the same axis that I want. Heres a pic. I want to freeze all the attributes so that i can just zero everything out when animating, but I want it to rotate following the first pictures axis.... is this possible?

MiAlx

Well.. What i do sometimes, but im sure there is a better way:

You freeze the transformations on the controller, then you put the controller into a group, rotate the group to get the controller into the correct axis and lastly go into component mode and rotate the shape to your liking..

When its for fk, you basically create an fk hierarchy with the groups and not the controllers themselves and point/orient/parent constraint accordingly so that the controls follow along..

But, like i said, there must be a better way and i'd love to know as well

haiddasalami

EDIT: Bah misread

slipsius

mialx, that works perfectly. thanks!

alistair, the joints are already at a specific angle. so changing the rotation wouldnt do anything positive

kodde

I do it similarly to how MiAlx does it. I usually use point and orient constraints to position the group exactly along the joint, then just remove the constraints.

I wrote my first MEL script ever because I got tired of doing this tedious thing over and over. I'll post it in a few if you wanna give it a go.

kodde

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2pWMprxcow"]koddeFKController - A Maya MEL script for speeding up orienting rigging control objects - YouTube[/ame]

You can get the script here:
http://kostas.se/files/koddeFKController.mel

MiAlx

Hey Slipsius, glad i could help

thanks kodde, very useful!