wow, this is a fast and solid rig with some nice features. The simple mesh makes this rig perfect to learn to animate with. And what a nice lighting setup!!!

MAX RULES! Best free rig I've got so far.

very nice rigg indeed.
some things i would to see in the next version is:

-squash for the head.

-controls for ears and nose

-making it possible to rotate the spine in fk and at the same time being able to use the squash and stretch.

-make the pelvis/hip area effected by the squash from spine aswell? maybe its just a preference but some how it looks weird to me.

still an excellent rigg!

Thanks for the shoulder fix. That really helps. Great rig! :-)

I also ran into problems with the shoulder. If I rotate in the Z axis beyond a certain point, the arms will no longer rotate only in the Y axis, but rather it causes the arm to rotate in multiple axis making it difficult to animate. Otherwise the rig is great, easy to use.

Hello fellow animators,

Some of you guys and girls are having problem with the shoulder control, so I thought I could write here to tell you how to solve it.

The problem your having has actually nothing to do with the rig, it's a problem called gimbal lock that can occur on all rigs. It has to do with how the computer calculates rotations in 3D. But there are ways around it! The first and best thing to do is to select the control your having problems with, go into the attribute editor and change the rotation order. The rotation order on the shoulder control is now XZY which works fine for some situations but you probably want to change it to something like XYZ. The only problem with this is that if you already have animated in XZY it will probably mess up your existing animation on the shoulder if you change the rotation order. Another way of solving the problem is by animating in local mode instead of gimbal mode. This is done by holding down the E key and the left mouse button. There you can choose Local. This will prevent gimbal lock showing, but it doesn't always get rid of the problem.

Hope this helps you out!

This has probably been asked a thousand times, but how do you turn on the IK controls on the arms? I can see the grayed out cubes on the hypergraph, but I still haven't found how to turn them on.
Thanks,

James, thanks for your reply. If there is any other n00b out there, it is under:

Window > Outliner
all_Grp | controls_Grp | root_Ctrl

Thanks again

The FK spine? Im just curious what the purpose is to have the FK-spine in different rotation orders. The top-2 controllers has the Y as X and X as Y, but the hip has Y as Y and X as X, this will be a problem when you use local/gimbal mode to "pose" your spine because it will not bend correct, it will bend in two different directions (twist) which is annoying. Can this be fixed or is it as designed?

Erik

i love this guy. thanks!
i know this is made as an animation tool, but i was wondering why i am not able to assign a different shader to him? i was wanting to play around w/ the shader and create a custom texture.

however, i get "error parsing arguments" when i try to apply a new shader.

thanks for any help.
casey

This rig is great and I really like it.
but I'm wondering if there is a way to snap the arm from FK to IK and vice versa. My animation require me to switch between FK and IK for the arms so it'll help me out a lot if there is a way to snap between the two.

good one

The best rig I've tried so far. Thanks a lot for the effort of making this.

EDIT: When I render with Mental ray in maya2009 i cant see the smooth or the dummy mesh. Any idea what that might be?

I love this rig, so lightweight and simple to use. One thing that I can not figure out though is how to move the entire rig. There's no Root control on him that I can see. Most rigs have one but this one doesn't I realize I can just grab the root in the outliner but it would be nice to have a controller on the rig. I also think that you should allow for it to be textured. I get the same error as the other fella that posted earlier.

How do you blend the IK to FK properly? The rig isn't the most conventional one. Or do I literally just have to guess the proper positions? Or use Locators everytime?

@ chickensandbeandip

Concerning your question about blending of IK/FK controls, the answer I can give from my own anecdotal experience with this rig is that you have to set keys on the IK/FK switch for the controls that you'll be blending. Additionally, try to keep the number of frames that span a switch as low as possible to avoid wierd mesh distortions, especially if the movement is a broad one between the switch (ie: slamming a hand on a table from a fully raised position). If done carefully, the switch is pretty much transparent, and can even accentuate a bit of interesting squash-&-stretch depedning on the circumstance. If there's a better way to pull this off gracefully, I'm not aware of it...

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@ jaisen

The reason you wouldn't see the dummy mesh that I know of is because Max' dummy mesh visibility layer is off by default in the Layers menu; you'd need to toggle this on and the smooth version (called "SmoothMesh") to off. As for why you don't see the "smoothed" version of Max, you have to increase his smooth setting within the rig from the "root_CTL" controller; the default value is zero (0). The name of the setting is called "Smooth Levels" and it's all the way at the bottom of the list of controllers, so it's easy to miss if you don't scroll through the entire list. I usually use a value of one (1), but I believe it can go up to a setting of three (3).

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@ milowerx

Actually, you can texture this rig quite easily, if you go about it the right way. What worked for me was to go into the outliner after I settled on a smoothing value for Max, open Max' mesh subfolder (geo_GRP), select each "*_Geo" object in turn (eg: "bodySkin_Geo") and then export each mesh to Headus UV Layout to unwrap each one in turn. Once each one was unwrapped to my liking, I would import the UVs for each mesh back into Maya, take a UVSnapshot of each Geo item, and go from there with Corel Painter. Granted, if what you meant was "the rig's mesh should've come unwrapped", I would agree. One word of warning though, once you've unwrapped your UV's at a specific "Smooth Level" setting, you cannot decrease or increase the level of smoothness without adversely affecting the UV map. This is probably obvious, but something worth noting if you know ahead of time you'll be rendering Max with a high smoothness value.

Oh, one more thing concerning the "moving the entire rig" comment. What usually works for me with this rig is to simply set all IK limb controllers called "Parent" from the default value of "world" to "Hip" or "Torso". Once these are set, translating the "root_Ctrl" controller will move the entire rig.

Hello,

My question is to do with the ik/fk blending. I'm currently attempting a push animation and need the arms to be ik controls so I can plant the hand on the box that he is pushing. I've tried selecting the shoulder control - animate- ik/fk keys - set ik/fk key but I keep getting the error : a joint or handle must be selected.

please help, I know its prob something simple, I'm usually a max user but I thought I would give maya a try :)

This seems like a nice rig, but i was wondering if you can scale the entire rig. It seems there isnt a control for that.

@ Mike D
To scale the rig just select the top node in the outliner and scale away.

@ Sophie White

Hi there Sophie, sorry to respond so late to your question. In any event, if you haven't worked it out on your own already, the IK/FK switch sub-controls are on the "ROOT" controller, not the shoulder controller. When you select the "ROOT" controller, you should see in that list a setting called "IK/FK arms" and "IK/FK legs". By default, I believe the rig is set up with FK on the arms (a value of "0"), and IK on the legs (a value of "1").

If you want to blend between these two types for the arms, all you have to do is set a key on the "IK/FK Arms", switch to the type of kinematics you'll be using with the controller (ie: FK to IK would be "0 to 1"), and then set another key on this controller; that's it! One word of caution though, I would recommend making your IK/FK transition span as few frames as possible to keep things looking natural/smooth (I usually don't go beyond 1 or 2 frames on average). Hope this helps...

Nice rig, but for some reason when using the Trax Editor (or even just copying the key frames), his right elbow doesn't keep the rotations from the first set into the copied set. I've set all the offsets to relative, and have redone my animation 7 times.

Goes without saying it's a great rig. Worked wonders for me in max, and was the obvious choice for teaching myself animation in Maya.

One thing though; i found the option to change the hand IK parent in the channel box, but i want to parent the hand to a prop rather than the world or another bodypart. How would i go about doing that?

Hello there! I've been working with max rig in a couple of animations, and it's very nice. I was making my animation in Maya 8.5 and the render looked pretty good. The mental ray light environment was working perfect, but I've just upgraded to Maya 2010 and it just screwed the final render. The IBL isn't working. It give me a black shaded image.
Hope you can tell me how to fix it.
Thank you in advance.

Great rig! The only thing i found i couldn't work my way around was the reflection on his head.

I have him standing in-front of a mirror in one of my shots and its his whole body is there but his head. Just a floating tong. If anyone can tell me how to fix it thank you!

Can anybody help with changing the background colour or the environment?

Does anyone know how to scale this Character Rig without breaking it?

does anyone know how to use sliders on attribute instead of enter some random values?
I'm newb in maya I usually use max
thanks