Rigging question...

# 1 24-08-2007 , 08:20 PM

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Join Date: May 2007

Posts: 15

This is my first attempt at rigging, so bear with me. I have read numerous posts, and a great deal of the book "Mastering Maya 8.5". But I have not found the answer to this question.

I have created a monster and I want to rig it so that, among other things, the lower jaw opens and closes. My first attempt didn't have sufficient bones in the rest of the skull to prevent parts of the skin from participating in the jaw movement which I did not want to move. Adding a few more bones, specifically in the upper jaw, seemed to solve most of the problem.

But now, when I open the lower jaw, all the teeth elongate! In a weird sort of way this makes sense, I haven't told Maya that the teeth are supposed to move intact with the jaw, but I don't know how to do that. How does one designate that certain parts of a skin are ridged and are not deformed even when the entire section of the skin to which they are attached is deforming?

Thanks in advance!

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# 2 24-08-2007 , 08:41 PM

Maniacal boy king of Babylon
Join Date: Aug 2005

Location: the netherlands

Posts: 1,605

i think you should separate the teeth from the mesh, then i would parent the upperteeth to the upperjaw joints and the lowerteeth to the lowerjaw joints.

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# 3 26-08-2007 , 04:35 AM

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yes, that is generally (well, I think so) the reccommended way to animate non-deforming parts of skeletons (actually, if you were doing just a skeleton, that's how you'd rig it).

Additionally, you can look into something called skin weights - I believe there are a couple of tutorials in the maya documentation, beyond what you can find elsewhere. Skin weights allow you to tell geometry how much they're affected by certain joints (and how much a joint affects certain geometry). Haven't messed with it myself, but I know the basic concept.

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# 4 26-08-2007 , 03:24 PM

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Join Date: May 2007

Posts: 15

Thank you. Tried both methods, they both work, although it took me a while to figure that I have to lock down the weights for a particular bone after I'm done making assignments to it, else Maya just automatically undoes all my work. I think I'm going with weights for the moment. It seems like the more "general" approach, and I need to learn all the details of how it works (or doesn't work) for future work.

Thanks for the help.

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