Design 950 Winter 2003 with Brian Stone
Heather Caprette
Rigging the kinematic skeleton to the mocap data within Maya
Problem with Joints not following or moving along with their IK Handles that are point constrained to the motion capture locators.
1. Tried unparenting the neck Curve from Spine 7 (where legs come
off) to see if that would free up the joints. They did move more into alignment
with the Head of the animal by stretching bone Spine 7. The back of the spine
still pointed off at a different direction from the head.
Also noticed that the curve is now not moving with the dog at all. The neck
and head bones are in pink.
2. Next, I’ll try orient constraining the Hip root joint
to the T1 (first thoracic vertebra) mocap marker.
Didn’t work.
3. Now, I’ll try saving the file as a different version
and replacing the Spline IK with RP IK. Includes: Breaking constraint connections
on all IK Handles. Freezing Transformations on all joints, reorienting every
one of their local rotation axes, creating new RP_IK Handles, Re-Point Constraining
IK Handles to Mocap Markers.
Result: The Hip Joint (a major Root Joint) is not traveling with the motion
capture data and seems to be pulling all the other joints back with it.
4. I solved by Point Constraining the top “Reference1”
node of the dog ik skeleton hierarchy to the Sacrum Motion Capture Marker. Now
all the joints are following along with the motion capture markers.
New Problem: The upper back bones are bowing upward unnaturally. I’ll
try taking out some bones to reduce this. See the spine bowing below. The straight
line underneath the spine joints is the ik handle.
5. Reducing the number of bones in the neck and reestablishing
the RP_IK sort of solved the problem. I still think the spine looks unnaturally
stiff, but this seems to be the solution I'm going to have to stick with for
now.