A Better Way To Orient Joints

[@missingno.5597]

Thanks for showing this. You literally did what I was taught too. It's nice to see that there's an easier way to orient joints.

[@ProjectPhantom3D]

Dude....Thank you. Thank you so F#$&ing Much. I'm just a newb in the industry but I already feel the hours of my time struggling with joint orientation just shedding off my life. Cheers! :beer:

[@Arctan95]

Made a quick script to fly through and set the "Preferred Angle" for all my bones to 0,0,0 and all the headache I've been having with IK is fixed. If anybody has the strange case when you create an IK handle, all bones in the chain suddenly gain rotation and you believe your joint orientations are correct, this is it. Live saver!

[@ninfiali]

This is a total game-changer. Thank you !

[@Solrreon]

The Better way and The better video :D TY

[@jeffreyfloresca8027]

This video is what im looking for! I always had that problem where when I apply joint orient, my LRA messed up. Thank you for this!

[@Sei783]

Been rigging for about seven years... the more ya know. Thanks!

[@alisinasaemi1652]

which version of maya u use sir? and thank for your tutorials

[@javiermonto5108]

I am in component with the question mark on and I can`t select it, why?, I`m using 2018

[@kerryniekdam]

SO I AM HAHA

[@Fluffyphish]

@@kerryniekdam I have the same problem, apparently, 2018 is bugged, still cant find a solution

[@OrkhanAshrafov]

freezing rotations on joints does the same thing apparently. doesn't it?

[@technicallyartistic]

Yup. It does. But understanding that this is what it is doing when you are freezing the rotation of a joint allows you to go back and repose your skeleton if you have already done things like started skin weighting or added controllers. You can change these values on your joints to match your controllers new position and you don't have to re-create the constraints. In that case if you tried to freeze your joints Maya wouldn't let you because they already have incoming connections.

[@OrkhanAshrafov]

***** yeah sure..really good stuff on this channel. keep up the good work!

[@Sei783]

For a long time, I didn't realize I could just freeze the rotations on a joint. Like I know it works for everything else, but it never seemed to work on joints. Perhaps it's a new feature since Maya 2009?

[@Ainfinity-22]

Thanks this helps a lot because in Unity if its vectors are not at zero its a nightmare to script.

[@nelson3d]

It works fine... except when I mirror joints... small value on other channels

[@LucaResto]

Simply, thanks

[@bentraje]

Thank you for this!

[@andresrosel821]

Nice.

[@Ekstrax]

LOL thx for this insight

[@emmabluturkese]

thanks a lot!

[@MichaelChin1994]

I don't understand, lol. I see what you're doing works.... But if it's so simple, why is this just not what it does by default? It feels too good to be true. But whatever, it works!

[@technicallyartistic]

Good question. You can freeze transforms on them too as another way of resetting them. I suppose it depends if you have anything hooked up to the joints? Also, as soon as you freeze transforms, you basically have to move the values back to rotation which there isn't a simple button for. And it gets more complicated if you use Rotate Axis also. I think it's really more about understanding the underlying math happening to get joints into positions and the offsets we layer on to keep it intuitive even if it's not representative of what the program is doing under the hood to achieve the position and motion. It's that we take for granted that a zeroed out joint is in it's default position. But the program has to know what that angle is to start with and relative to whatever it's parented under. So really what it's doing, assuming from starting from 0,0,0 this bone is in this position in space, and then we are orienting an axis as this angle, and then from there, relative to it's parent, this much farther out in space, and positioned at this angle. Everything always has some rotation to it. Joint orient is basically a layered offset, and so it Rotate Axis. But for most people it's hard to think about things always being rotated up to 3 axis at once and remembering what the default position would be to reset each joint to. So we store that offset in Joint Orient, and sometimes Rotate Axis(when we want the translate gimbal oriented differently than the rotation gimbal).

[@sidarthshukla1158]

dude this is the longest video I have ever scene, I couldn't find if this video is useful or not but one thing its really hard to concentrate. I tried 3 times going back and listen it again and again but I don't know if its your voice or your over explanation but something is there which is making this video so much boring and hard to watch.

[@technicallyartistic]

I am sorry you found this frustrating. I will use this detailed and useful feedback to try and make explaining how to set values of joints to be co_plainer so that your animation is using the correct trigonometry to solve its IK algorithm in a intuitive way more exciting and much shorter in the future. But for now this free video I made will have to suffice as these videos take a long time to make and there's no incentive putting them up.

[@sidarthshukla1158]

@@technicallyartistic sorry for my word, it was not that bad as my words are... I am looking for a way to orient the last joint in every chain... The last joint of every chain is always frustrating i usually use script to orient the joint and after that i have to do some changes manually for some joints.. but every time the last joint creates problem, i don't know how to fix that because i don't know why the manual options don't work on the last joint...

[@technicallyartistic]

@@sidarthshukla1158 If you want it oriented the same direction as it's parent, simple zero out any rotation and joint orient values. If you want it oriented a different direction you need something for it to aim at, or zero everything out like I said before, manually rotate it into the direction you want eye-balling it and then either freeze transforms on the joint, or relocate the numbers in the rotation attributes to their corresponding joint orient fields. (Move the values from rotate to joint orient, rotations should always be zero in the end for animators.) If you have anything skinned to the joints or IK it may not let you do that without removing those first. If you already have skin weighting you don't want to loose, save of a copy of your scene before doing this, make your changes, reference in the copy with the skin weighting and copy it onto the new file's mesh, using "name" as the primary way of copying. If that doesn't work well, set labels on both sets of joints then use labels as the method. I usually use one to one, name and closest bone as my three methods by default, and then if I use labels, Lables, one to one, name.

[@sentinalchocobo]

select your whole outliner chain. Shift click group + sign to open all the joints. then shift select down the outliner all joints. Freeze transformations. rigging > skeleton >orient (try whatever setting, world worked for my thing) should orient all your joints.