Rigging in Maya - Mini joints and Non-Zero rotations
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
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
Replies
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.
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?
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!
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...