-Spine System looks deceptively easy but has some great things going on under the hood. The bound joints that are in the spine system are parented to maya's hair folicles that are attached to a mesh 10 units long.
- When a hair folicle is made, it comes with a few extra nodes to deal with, but eliminating those will give you an object similar to a locator, but it is pinned to the mesh - specifically in the middle of the face it is applied to. They stay pinned to the mesh very well. The bind joints are children of individual controls, which are then children of the folicle objects. The folicle objects are scale constrained to the global control.
- The system is only able to twist due to a blend shape that is being manipulated by a twist deformer. Three joints also are bound to a wire deformer on this same mesh to allow for secondary movement.
- The twist of the end controls controlled the twist attribute of the deformer - acting on the blend shape. Unfortunately because the movement was reversed, plusminusAverage nodes and multiplyDivide nodes were used to make the proper visual movement of the twist.
- The volume network was setup using the RBG channels of a condition node. The actual plugging in went a little over my head but I understood the overall concept. Depending on the value of the "volume magnitude" channel that I set up in each sub control of the spine the multiplyDivide nodes would affect the scale of the X and Z of the joints beneath said sub-controllers. If the condition node was false (when I turn the global volume channel "off") then no volume deformation would happen and the joints would not scale inward nor outward.
- I learned that it is also helpful to correctly name input nodes - especially if you are creating a complex setup like a facial rig. They will help visually in the Node Editor when manipulating those input nodes that you don't always see in the Outliner.
- It is important to Bookmark specific Node Networks to allow easy access to certain systems of your rig. You know it can get virtually unreadable if you simply select ALL input and output nodes.
- UC nodes, or Unit Conversion Nodes were not visible in previous versions of Maya. They still existed, but in no visual form whatsoever. The Unit Conversion Nodes are often automatically made when a connection is set. They help maya interperet numerical data to feed into another node.
- The start, mid and end control of the spine are actually translating the three joints that are bound to the wire deformer that is applied to the blendshape. Maintain offset is used, so the master spine can be located anywhere and still affect the hidden blendshape properly.
- When positioning joints for the main skeleton, make sure to add the Display>Transform Display>Local Rotation Axes tool to your shelf. Instead of going into component mode to see your local joint axis, you can simply toggle this tool to view them.
- To make sure joints are aiming precisely down the chain you wish, use aim constraints. Make sure to have a locator to let the aim constraint know what the up vector is when you constrain.
- The top right of the maya window has a dial down that allows you to select components by name. If you are wise with your naming convention, you can select many objects through your whole scene. For example, if every one of my bind joints had _bn_ in it, I could wildcard search using *_bn_* and maya will select every object that has a bind joint. I can then simply bind my mesh without having to shift select every single bone to be bound.
- Hold right mouse button and click "select hierarchy" to select everything under a joint. Great for selecting long chains without going into Outliner.
- Rather than going into the Move Tool settings to change the move axis, hold the W key, then left mouse click to access a menu of all your move axis. Works with all your translation tools.
- Mirror Paint Weights tool can often be more helpful than the reflection settings in the paint weights brush.
- Remember to have easy access to the Weight Hammer. While dealing with a bound mesh that has some rogue points that aren't being weighted properly, simply select them, and click the Weight Hammer. It will bring it's weight to that of it's neighboring points.
- Although the Weight Hammer only works for joint bound meshes, the Paint Cluster Weights tool will allow you to do a smoothing or averaging function to your selected points, making that averaging process a little easier than walking the points down.
Twist Network
Volume Network
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