Hi everyone,
First time using mGear here.
I’m building a custom rig. Started using the biped template but deleted the limbs, legs and arms to put the component that has bendy limbs (tangents).
So I’m creating the guides for the fingers using the lite_chain_01.
But the guides are too big making it difficult to place them. My character is very stylized with tiny fingers.
Is there a way to scale down the size of the guides?
Thanks
Hi Bruno, yes you can just scale the guides. Is anything wrong happening when you scale them?
You might also have to scale the control icons later when you build the rig.
Thank you. Scaling the guides is working, at the vertex component level.
I thought there were like a global parameter somewhere that I could scale them globaly, that each new component that I drew came smaller.
Another thing I noticed was that my maya scene was in inches. Making the " build rig" behave all wrong. I switched my project to centimeteres and now all the guides are smaller and the build rig works properly. Thank you @chrislesage
yes, mGear (and many Maya tools) make the assumption that you work in CM. Indeed changing the units will make some tools in Maya to behave strangely.
I had a mGear fork that was working with any unit. But was a real nightmare to maintain since many methods in Maya API and cmds expect cm and there is no way to ask for another unit.
in short. keep the units to CM 
Most modelers/riggers makes all their models using real-world units. i.e.- humans are ~180 cm or 1.8 meters. The guide controls all seem to assume we are making humans 18cm tall. Does mGear require modelers to pretend centimeters are meters and not model to real world units?
It seems as if the guides should be 10x the size of their default creation. When I change the guide scale to 10, all subsequent components underneath that get created with default scale of 0.1, which I then change back to 1.0.
I’ve noticed the same thing. Actually on a past project - the very first project I ever used mGear on - the characters were 0.1x. So one 6’ character was 18cm tall in Maya, for example. And the guides all seemed to come in at a good scale.
And now on one project, the character is 400cm tall. So I don’t even know what scale they are using. But the guides and default controller icons all come in very tiny. It might be nice to have some kind of an option on the guide settings, to specify a scale. Not a different unit, but just a scale multiplier.
EDIT 2: this reply is not correct to address the previous quesiton. My bad. I was thinking about the rig controls. I will keep it just in case someone find it useful.
Hello! 
Let me explain the reason because the default scale and how it works in general regarding guides scale
The default size is a small because it was the scale I used in production for offline render in previous companies. For example The movie Lupin the First is using that scale.
The reason behind that choice is the Maya skin precision issue and very large BGs.
In other project we used the “real scale” taking 1 maya unit == 1 cm but we had to use a hack to compensate this error precision with pre-bind matrix operations.
The issue here is that not all the deformetes have pre-bind matrix and also after adding this hack the skinning can’t be edited because new connections are created between the joint and the skincluster. Making a little complex to maintain the rigs
Here is more information related with the issue.
But this only apply if you stay in Maya, so when it goes to game engine that is not an issue.
You can scale the guide any size, and unless you have the controls already extracted in the guide. The size of the controls should be updated accordingly with the relative size of the component.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The automatic size of the control don’t use the scale XYZ value of the guides. Indeed the guides size is not used for anything. The size is calculated base is some heuristics based in the guide locators positions.
Here the image of a guide scaled x10 results
My recommendation is to create your own template with the desire default size or override the default template.
More info:
PS EDIT: we use both scales depending on the project and needs. I mean 1 unit = 1 cm or 1 unit == 10cm
What we never change is the Maya default units. Because many API methods expect that, and it is a nightmare to support (I had a mGear version in the past with support for other units, and stopped that branch because even some Maya defaults tools where breaking 
)
That all makes sense. But I think there is something else going on.
I just did a test with the biped template, and scaling it to different scales. For example,
However, on my production rig, I took my hips, and duplicated it. SOME of the guides are created as very tiny. Scale = 0.050524. (This is the 400cm character.) I can’t discern a pattern yet, but I’ll keep investigating. And I’ll make an example rig to upload sometime this week.
guide = 1.0
master_C0_root = 5.408295
local_C0_root = 1.0
spine_C0_root = 3.48701
hips = 1.049508
Even if I neutralize the scale to all of those parent guides to 1.0, that still happens on SOME of the guides.
@chrislesage @Count_zer0
Oh! sorry, my bad. I was thinking about the rig controls 
Yes, that is something I was looking to address in the future. But I can have a look to see if there is an “easy” fix
I have log it here:
@chrislesage @Count_zer0
I did a little change, now the new component guides will match the parent scale.
the ticket is close now:
@chrislesage About the other thing going on. I couldn’t reproduce it Please let me know if you find a way to reproduce. Thanks!
Hey @Miquel [edit, file removed, thanks!]
I can reproduce it, but I don’t know how or why yet. How to reproduce it on my end. Duplicate hips_C0_root with mGear -> Shifter -> Duplicate
If it acts the same on your side, you should see a few of the guides come in very tiny. For example, “beltBuckle_C1_root”.
I have the file I will check ASAP
