At this moment I am standing at the very beginning of Rigging. In the last weeks I rigged and skinned my first character in Maya 2012 for a school project. I used the “Characterization tool” and now I am using the “Character Controls” option to animate the character.
After looking at some tutorials, the HumanIK thread in this forum and articles there are still some questions left.
First of all it does not seem possible to key only translation or rotation (and if I do so the animation breaks) so I am using the “S” shortcut to set the keys. I never liked to use the S shortcut because it feels like losing the control and creating a mess in the Graph Editor.
I am trying to create an idle animation at this moment and I am having problems with the Graph Editor. It does not seem possible to edit the curves and they appear to be locked. I can neither edit them into linear/flat/… curves or edit the curve by hand. It appears to be locked somewhere somehow.
I am sorry if the question already appeared somewhere else in the forum.
I hope that you can help me to fix these problems.
Hey there,
Are you very set on using HumanIK? It’s generally meant for motion capture retargeting rather than fullon handkeyed animation.
If that’s more what you’re after with your own character, I’d look at a handful of autoRig scripts on CreativeCrash.com instead because they’ll generate a more animation friendly rig for you.
Animation can be done with HIK you just have to understand what it is doing.
-S hot key- just go and adjust settings for what you need -Animate menu -set key options
If you don’t want to create a graph mess ( I am guessing you are not animating pose to pose and are doing a more layer approach?) then you can just use the shift w,e, r keys to key only translate/rotate.
turn off the character blue box-control rig align after time change in order to have a rig that acts/displays a bit more like a regular rig during play back so you can see what the IK v. FK is doing.
Graph editor- make sure you are selecting what is in control of the body part- the fk skeleton or the ik, with reach off, it is all FK.
yeah it is a bit rough starting but he was all ready down that path. It still is not any where close to how smooth/fast it works in MotionBuilder, getting closer but can defiantly be improved.
the HumanIK-Rig in Maya is not that comfortable and accesable from the start like it is in motionbuilder. That’s for sure.
Your rotation-keys-tangent problem is related to the rotation calculation the HumanIK uses. It is set to quarternion instead of euler rotation. Therefore you can’t access the tangents, because there are none.
If you want to set the curves back to euler try this:
Click(left mouse button) into the dark space in the control rig window in order to select every effector
open the graph editor
shift select every object and attribute in the leftside list
now you can see all the keys on the right side, select them all
under the curves menu you can find “change rotation interpolation”
change the keys rotation interpolation to “independant euler”
E voila, now you have the good old tangents back to the keys.
does Motionbuilder work with quarternion rotation right from the start?
Everytime I use mb I can use tangents all the time.
Or does mb use some fancy technique letting us use euler rotations(fcurve-editor) as visuals but it calculates everything in quart. avoiding gimbals all the way?
If so, I did not hear anything about it before. But it would be awesome. :eek:
So I tried animating with the HIK for a couple of times in the last days. I think you are right Brad “Animation can be done with HIK you just have to understand what it is doing.” I figured some things out (e.g. curve editing) but still hat a lot of trouble with a lot of other things. It is, as mentioned by dgovil, for sure not very friendly for beginners I suppose. I had a rough time and the animation did not look very fluent or natural in the end.
I tried to fix it but it became a huge mess in the end. Because of the deadline I decided to build my own rig yesterday evening and finished the animation this morning.
I am curious about the HIK and hope to find some time to go back and try it again by using this tool. I got some handy tips here. Thank you guys.
