Hi,
Today i was exploring some methods that have been helping me to study rigs.
-- show joints of rig
This lets us see whether things get stretched ... if they do we can begin exploring in more detail how they got stretched ...
-- viewing inputs in attribute editor
Say there was a weird looking complex type of node in input we could use mel to just select that node and begin exploring it in more detail
-- viewing connections in hypergraph editor
With something selected we can get a closer look at how rig works by seeing what things are connected to it. (sometimes helpful to: frame selection then zoom out, view inputs only ... )
-- using mel's ( `select -r nameOfRigPart` )
This way can just look at inputs ... of one joint, or one node to get better idea of whats happening.
-- temporarily breaking connections of rig parts
Say there is an animator control that is feeding into some complex graph in hypergraph... we could break the attribute connections and manually change how the node is using it in channel editor. This way we can see in realtime what is the effect of the animator control on the rigging system.
I highly recommend studying Walsman's Mouse Rig at (aaronwalsman dot com).. I'm still trying to learn the difference between worldInverseMatrix and parentInverseMatrix ... and how he uses these in distance calculations with vectorProduct nodes...
Hope this was helpful.
Cheers,
-Nate
Inspired by Aaron Walsman (aaronwalsman dot com)
