Maya transform nodes and module rigging frustration

Rigging
1

Hey guys I was wondering if any of you guys knew any quick fix’s or tutorials to this issues i’m running into. Currently I have many rigs in module parts, (joint hierarchy underneath a group). IE an rigged hand with IK/FK which is placed underneath a group. I was wondering if there was a way to transform the group then up-parent the joint hierarchy so I would be able to create a left and right arm rig simply by mirroring the group. What happens currently is that there is a transform node which is produced when I ungroup the joints (I am aware it is trying to). This is frustrating since i am unable to parent groups into my bind joint hierarchy (this problem is especially bad when its dealing with scale). (I guess what i’m trying to ask is if there is a way that joints automatically set the scale to 1 and finds the positions of the mirrored object while keeping all the constraints/ binds in tact.). Yea now that I think about it This might be a bit much lol. Well for the time being i’m gonna manually try and solve this issue.

Thanks for the look and hopefully you guys could help me out

2

Have a look around forums, here and on CGTalk, on how to mirror character setups. I suspect it’s a bit more complicated than you might think.

3

I fought with doing that years back. I settled on writing a function that creates locator duplicates, groups and mirrors them, creates new joints, snaps them to their respective locators, then parents the copies. In my latest autorig I also duplicate all user attributes.

Don’t forget to freeze the joints when you’re done!