Another year another new Blog ;) this time its for 3D rigging.

Lecture One - Introduction to Rigging

Basic Parenting

Parenting is a system in Maya by which you set up a control system where one object is Parent to a Child object. In the image below you can see a 3 point Bone or Joint, Start, Middle,End or Shoulder, Elbow and Wrist.

Step 01 - Create the Bone or Joint

I first create the Bone or Joint - Which can be found in Skeleton - Joint Tool - It does not matter which shape or size the object is.

As you can see in the outliner there is already a hierarchy of a parent child system present by creating the joint we will be replacing this default parent child situation with control objects.

Step 02 - Creating the Control Objects

I decided that I would create an example of a basic arm joint with simple control objects - using NURBS Primitives

Step 03 - Parenting the control objects

Using the P Hot key I parent the objects in order of which i want them to be parent Child - Obviously if this was a human arm it would be  Shoulder - Elbow - Wrist -Hand - Fingers, I am only showing a joint chain with shoulder, Elbow and Wrist so it does not matter about hand and fingers.

The sign that the Joint has become parent or a child is that the joint has become invisible, which can be sorted by Un-parenting the selected objects - You can also parent objects in Maya that are not parts of joint

What I learnt

I learnt how the parent child hierarchy works properly in Maya and what you have to do to create a properly working parent child situation - I also learnt how the parent child system affects bones and joints in Maya and how I can control them, There advantages being simplicity and ease of use, and there many disadvantages

Constraints an equivalent to Parent/Child

Again for this i am going to start with a Bone/Joint in Maya - I did not want to change the item i was using as I wanted to show the advantages and disadvantages of both

Step One

Step One again was to create the physical Bone/Joint system - again in the Shoulder, Elbow and Wrist format - Or 3 Joint System

Step Two - Creating the Constrain Objects

Similar to the parenting part i want to create and object to point constrain the Joint to, Im going to use NURBS spheres again to show the same advantages and disadvantages as previously stated

Step Three - Adding the Constraint to the Bone/Joint


Using the constrain Point Tool 

The constrain point tool has an options menu, Similar to many tolls in Maya  By default it should be set up as below with a value of 0.0000 in all offset, Animation later set to non.

Then Below are the physical constrain option - Which are X, Y and Z axis  - This is the main constrain (from my knowledge and opinions) You can fiddle with these options - Each one locks to an axis essentially.