Im wondering if anyone knows of any tutorials, or the best way to create a rig for a skirt in Maya. Bones only. Well have too many characters in scene to make cloth sims plausible. I’ve seen a way that uses limits and a point constraint so that when your knee bone goes forward, so does the skirt bone, but it was made in softimage, and the bones dont seem to act the same way in Maya. If you select and translate the child of a 2 parent chain, the parent bone wont rotate.
Is there an “automated” skirt rig setup in maya like mentioned above, or will i have to rely on FK only?
Simulate the cloth on a separate mesh, then glue bones to the position and normal orientation of the simmed cloth. You don’t have manual control but it often works pretty well if you can afford a reasonable number of bones.
Make a nurbs cloth model and animate it using CVs. Glue bones to the surface by duplicating surface curves and using spline IK. You can color the nurbs mesh to indicate stretching in U or V (save the original length of isoparms and compare to the deformed length, so animators can see if they’ve stretched too far).
Do two setups of splines for each chain in the skirt. One spline is deformed by a lattice deformer skinned to the leg, the other is animated by hand. Nurbs loft them together and then skin to the isoparm between them – if you choose the isoparm based on how close the leg is to skirt you can get semi-automatic skinning.
All of these work, none of them make it not a pain in the butt. sigh
I’ve seen #1 above used a few times.
By slaving bones to the verts of a (non-exporting) copy of a mesh
You can utilize any number of game engine prohibited deformers to drive the bone animation.
I saw this approach used to drive face bones with blendshapes to great effect.
All of these work, none of them make it not a pain in the butt. sigh[/QUOTE]
This is what I was afraid of…
Ok, thanks for the tips, guys. Ill definitely look into all this. But Im curious. How do you glue bones to surfaces? Is there a public script that does it? I think I tried to do that before and couldn’t figure it out.
EDIT: D’oh. Point On Poly Constraint. How did I miss that before…
The point on poly constraint will work, but you might also look into using a follicle and constraining to that. If you use just the follicle node, your runtime playback will still be very fast and you can use the normal vector change of the mesh that you’re sim-ing to drive the rotation of the bone as well.
Lastly, if you want you can’t afford a sim from maya, you might look into doing some damping constraints on the bones in motion builder, and then moving the animation from that back into Maya.
Yes, the damp constraint is nice in Mobu, the closest you have in Maya is using a muscle spline from the Maya muscle rigging menu to create a semi automatic deformation system that also has jiggle built in. Bonus tools has a nice auto rig script that will setup a lofted ncloth surface and hook up the bones to it.
using a nurbs cylinder that follow the shape,
attach follicles in strategic places,
let those follicles drive joints with a parent constraint
use clusters to drive the cv’s of the nurbs cylinder
parent the clusters to a control
and skin the mesh to the joints.
this setup is a lot but is really easy to create in script, it will only require some input from the skinning