Character and Narrative: Creating Constraints and Connecting Controllers

The next step from making controls was to set up constraints between the joints and our created orient groups. From here we could parent the controller to the orient group for every single controller so when we connected them to their respectful joints this would allow us to control them using the controllers we had created. This process was quite tedious (as is most things in the field of animation, it seems there is no escaping these repetitive jobs) as I had to repeat the same process over and over for each joint. However I seemed to get through the task rather easily.

Or so I thought.

I must have gone wrong along the way, as when I came to apply an orient constraint to the controller and joint in the next step, my head tilted like so:

Maya Issue

It turns out I must have froze the transformations on my orient groups, making them orientate around world coordinates, rather than the local ones of the group I had parented my joints to. I was instead supposed to freeze transformations on the CONTROL rather than the group. To fix my problem I would have had to go back and un-parent all of my orient groups and control handles so that there was no longer a hierarchy that I had created in the previous tutorial, and repeat the process making sure not to freeze the transformation of the groups.

Look at ALL Those Scene Files

I was lucky enough to have created a separate save file for each step, so rather than doing that I simply reloaded from my last 'checkpoint' as it were, and started the process again. This was quite painful to have to do, but I made sure this time around that I had the right component selected each time I froze the transformation, and I was able to get to where I needed to be.

Working Constraints and Controllers

When I was completing the next video tutorial where I was shown how to make the controllers effect the joints I made sure to double check that each controller was working before I moved on to the next in hopes that I wouldn't have to repeat any processes. I am quite glad that I have encountered a problem as it did make me think on what went wrong and how I could have solved the problem, so in the future if this happens (hopefully it won't) I won't panic as I will know what needs to be done.

Now all that's left is to bind and get this bad boy finished off.