Hi I am learning to animate in Maya and after watching the animation rigging toolkit tutorials they shown me how to set up a default skeleton. I don’t want it be the default grey model and instead use my own mesh. I have downloaded a mesh online but to animate it I need a skeleton so I am completely confused on what to do. I have the skeleton I need and the mesh I need but I am wondering how I combine them. Please give insight.
Hey there!
My workflow for this is simply to open up your mesh, and then begin creating your character using the tools. When you get to the deformation setup tab, you’ll then need to paint skin weights on your model to bind it to the skeleton, and then you can build the control rig from there.
Some good settings to use for super fast default weights are:
- bind to selected joints bind method:
- closest in hierarchy skinning method
- classic linear normalize weights
- interactive dropoff rate 400 ← This is the big one that will give you really clean lines of separation between the joint weights.
Hope that helps!
Hey brycem24 -
After dealing with the Joint Mover you move ahead to the Deformation Setup, at this point you will want to select the generated skeleton and your character mesh and in Maya under Animation Menu >> Skin >> Bind Skin >> Smooth Bind. This is the same way you would connect any skeleton to any mesh in Maya. Make sure your Smooth Bind options are set to Interactive for Normalize Weights. You should then be able to continue using the ART and painting your vertices before making your final control rig.
Thanks
-Eric Ketchum
For me the bind method selected joints does not work. When checking the influences, only the root joint is there. Joint hierarchy is working but messing up my model. I really dont know why I can’t use your setup.
Can you really do 400 ‘Dropoff rate’ or did you mean ‘40.0’?
yeah, that is correct. I’ll edit that!