Joint Pivots Process Level UP
Added 2021-05-13 04:55:10 +0000 UTCI had a major breakthrough today improving my workflow for animated joint pivots. This is a technique for having joints change their rotation point while the connected mesh blends from one shape to another. Think of an arm growing longer while still bending at the elbow, which is normally not something you can do with blend shapes and joints unless you can get away with distorting the blend shape. My technique was used heavily on Vince.
Maya makes doing this possible, but with excessive difficulty. My best method so far has been to create two locators linked to the rotation pivot adjustments on each joint. However, positioning the locators is mind-bendingly confusing at best, painfully difficult at worst. Imagine using your mouse to move something to the right, and instead of going right, it goes down and to the left. It gets worse. You then have to restore the joint position using a second motion which mangles your first change in yet another arbitrary direction. Then fixing that mangles your last fix, and so on and so on.
Good news, though. I arrived at a solution that satisfies everything I need, and most things I want. There was a good amount of matrix math involved, and I had to code everything in "Mel", Maya's scripting language from hell. But after TWELVE HOURS of beating my head on my desk I can now slide a single locator and "update" the rotation pivot of a joint with a single click.
I'd be more excited if I didn't have a consistent, dull headache coming on for the last two hours. When I said this was painfully difficult, I meant it.
Can't wait to put it to use though.
Cheers!
Paul
