Maya Ani

mation and IK tips

Motion capturing with Maya?

Just use the recordAttr (look in Mel help, Maya) and turn your mouse into a motion capture device!

Answer from Maya-Listserv on Highend3d.com (Jeremy Spencer, Thu, 22 Feb 2001 10:31:31)

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Animating with relatives so you are able to animate manually?

Three skeletons:

 

True skeleton
FK skeleton (forward kinematics)
DK skeleton ("driven" kinematics; could be driven by IK, expressions, set driven keys ... )

You orient constraint each true skeleton joint to its corresponding FK and DK joints. Each constraint would have weighting for the two targets.
You'd add an attribute (named something like "FkDk") to some control node, which would be a float ranging from 0 to 10 (the range is chosen, to make the channel box mouse slider for this attribute easier to use).
You'd do set driven key animation with this attribute, and all of the constraints, so that when FkDk = 0 (and the channel box slider all the way left) the constraint weighting on the FK joints = 1, DK joints = 0; and when FkDk = 10 (and the channel box slider all the way right) the constraint weighting on the FK joints = 0, DK joints = 1.
Now, if you want to do straight forward manual FK animation, you'd do it on the FK chains. And if you wanted to use a set driven key setup for a fist clench, you'd do it on the DK chains.
The "true" skeleton would take its animation from one chain or the other (or the blend between them) depending upon the setting of the FkDk slider.
When we had used this system (on our own project), we already had a weighted skin bound to our skeleton. There was no problem in adding these control skeletons and constraints.

Answer from Maya-Listserv on Highend3d.com (Sat, 03 Mar 2001 21:14:47)

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Basic workflow for an elbow?

A basic workflow for an elbow is to group the cylinder to the forarm, create the influence object and use set driven key to control the rotations and scaling of the influence based on the y rotation of the elbow joint. similarly, you can add a cylinder influence to the bicep, parented under the shoulder, and paint the weights so there is a smooth transition (i can usually flood the defaults a couple of times), then drive the scale using the elbow joint y rotation to get a bulge.

Attaching a blend to an already bound model (presumably in bindPose)? Attach your blend to and already bound model (presumably in bindPose) in the normal way. Put your cursor over the model and hold down the rightMouseButton From the popUp list choose Inputs->CompleteList. A list of History Operations will come up with the BlendShape at the top of the list (most recent addition). Use the middleMouseButton to drag that entry down to the postion above the tweakNode making it the first deformation operation performed when deforming the model.

Answer from Maya-Listserv on Highend3d.com (Carl Edwards, Sat, 10 Mar 2001 15:10:11)

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