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Naming Conventions and combining guide templates

Hi there,
I’m a rookie 3D Generalist and I’ve been having some difficulty (due to a lack of knowledge on my part) with MGear.

I’ve ended up making my rig much more complicated than necessary, and I’m just here to ask for some advice on how to do certain things that will help clean up my process.

Firstly, how do you combine guide templates so they produce one rig when you hit build selection? In my current project I was unable to figure this out, so I have chain rigs (for two ears and a tail) separate from the biped rig. This has caused some issues down the line as the tail and ears rig do not follow the main body rig.

Secondly, are there any expected naming conventions to be followed when creating multiple guide templates? I noticed because I already had a chain template in my file that it caused issues when I added another one (I kept getting an error about that component name already existing in the maya cache). This caused some issues with joints not being built when I hit build selection.

Thanks in advance for any help/advice. I do plan to go through more MGear tutorials, but these two issues in particular I could not find much advice on.

I guess the shortest answer is don’t have two guides. Just take your components from your 2nd guide, and parent them appropriately under the first guide’s components. Which should be fine as long as you don’t have name clashes. If you do have name clashes, rename them before reparenting. Then delete the 2nd guide.

Is there a reason you are making two or more guides?