Arm joint orientation issue on build, looks skewed 45 degrees. Is it my guides, my mesh or my ineptitude?

[Chloe_Hughes]

Heya! I’ve animated a lot with mGear rigs for work and some freelance projects and have loved using the rigs, so I really wanted to use it for rigging a character for my short film. I’ve only ever done super basic rigs with native Maya tools before.

I’m picking up mGear well enough, but have been running into an issue w/ the rotation of the joints along my character’s arms upon building the rig. The arms are in a relaxed A pose. When I position the guides like how the videos show, it looks fine. On building the rig, even if I have the guides oriented the correct way, the joint orientation (and subsequently, the control curves) are rotated in a way which isn’t great for animating.

I’ve tried:

• Moving the guides into place only by rotating them (no translation), and vice versa.
• Using the biped template.
• Using the different shifter components for arms.

So I’m wondering if it’s something I’m doing wrong with guide placement, if there’s anything I should do to fix it after the rig is built, or if it’s a problem with the posing of my character. I feel a bit stupid not being able to figure it out after watching through videos and scrolling through the forums

Here’s a video trying to show the issue: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J8Q7DIJMvfNher40CxpW3zLQc7xw3HrG/view?usp=sharing

Character pose (odd proportions I know, she is based on classical greek sculptures):

Thanks for helping a clueless animator
Chloe

[chrislesage]

Hi @Chloe_Hughes welcome.

At first I thought you meant that your joints were being oriented in world orientation or something.

(EDIT: Whoops! I didn’t read carefully enough. I just read that you tried to rotate the guide only. This was my suggested fix. Can you upload your guide to look at?)

When you were placing your guides, you probably translated the elbow guide. I’ve found that doing this causes problems.

So I suggest you do this instead. Try to place the elbow by rotating the arm_L0_root guide. And then place the wrist by only rotating the elbow in rotateY and translateX. If you have any other translateYZ or rotateXZ on your elbow, I think it will cause these offset problems.

Likewise, your arm_L0_wrist should only have translateX values, and no translateYZ and no rotateXYZ.

The arm_L0_root guide seems to be free to rotate in all 3 axes.

I suspect if you clean those values, you should get a properly oriented limb when you build.

(Ideally, the limb component would be able to solve a clean triangle even if you have translation on the elbow/knee. But I just don’t think it does right now.)

[Chloe_Hughes]

Hey, thanks for replying!

I did think that whatever was going wrong was happening from somewhere from the elbow onwards, but couldn’t nail down what. This makes sense!
Here are the most recent guides, right now this is the least janky iteration I’ve managed so far https://we.tl/t-SWnMWMv9V5

Thanks very much for the help, really appreciate it

[chrislesage]

The guide you sent does have translation values on the elbow and wrist. (Though the orientation isn’t as bad as your original screenshot.)

If I zero those out and only use translateX and rotateY, like I suggested, it does seem to even out the orientation of the controls. You mentioned you had already tried that. If you try it again, and still have trouble, I’ll take another look.

[Chloe_Hughes]

Hey sorry about that, went back to try again - I got it working properly with this advice, finally! Thank you so much for the help Really appreciate you taking the time to check.