Control Rig with extra joints

[DannyTheGamer]

Hi,

I have a humanoid character with a tail, I created a HumanIK skeleton and added a set of tail joints starting from the hips.

So all is good until I create the Control Rig, because it doesn't include the tail joints since they were not part of the original HumanIK skeleton. This also goes for other joints I added (like dynamic joints for hair and extra joints of any kind).

Is there any way to add extra joints to a HumanIK control rig?

Cheers!

[gautham.chandran47 · Accepted solution]

I heard you can add more control points to the control rig by editing its xml file.

If you're just using HIK to retarget then leave those extra joints and after baking the animation to the control rig or skeleton, you can manually animate those extra joints or bake them separately if you're using dynamics on those.

Hope this helps.

[DannyTheGamer]

Thanks man, just a quick question - is animating joints directly from the skeleton the same as animating them from the control rig in Maya or is that a risky move, since joints are used for the skinning process?

I used to use 3DS Max with the CAT Rig, and there were two modes in which we would deform the skeleton, one was for editing the rig and the other was to animate, and attempting to animate in the former mode would have been very problematic (aside from being straight up wrong), hope that clears up where I'm coming from

[gautham.chandran47]

You can just keep animate with control rig.

The only reason to bake the animation to the joints is to export it to any game engines where controllers and constraints won't work.

Even in that workflow, we only bake the animation to the joints at the last minute, as you said its a risky move, it won't be easy to edit the animation after that.

Hope this helps.

[DannyTheGamer]

Hmmm what I meant was in the case of extra joints that are not affected by dynamic properties, but that don't have the corresponding control rig joints since they are not part of the original HIK, is it a good idea to animate using those very joints?

Sorry if my question wasn't clear before

[gautham.chandran47]

Yeah, if you are unable to add custom control points to the control rig then you can just leave them as they and animate them independently. 

[DannyTheGamer]

Perfect, that's good enough. Thanks so much man!

[gautham.chandran47]

Happy to help