NEED HELP! Working on assignment for class and no one has been able to help

[hannah.moore8]

Hello I am a student working on a rigging assignment and no matter what I do I cannot connect my joints. What I have searched up is that they recommend that you reset Maya but I am a complete and utter noob and have no idea how to do so or what they are even saying on how to do so. 

So I guess my question is "Is there a way to fix my joints not connecting without resetting Maya?" If I cannot do this without resetting Maya how do I do it so that I can understand what to do as someone who doesn't yet understand technology or how to properly reset Maya? Preferably a video as I am a visual learner and dyslexic so its really hard to read and comprehend at the same time.  

[hannah.moore8]

So New info I did end up resetting Maya and still didn't fix the problem so a new question is it better to create locators and then joints? That was the main thing I did. I didn't use any locators but Joints so is that the problem? 

[Kahylan]

Hi!

Can you tell me what exactly you mean by "connect my joints"?

What are you trying to connect them to and in what way?

Are there any Errors or Warnings poping up at the bottom right of your screen when you try to do it?

I'm sure this problem can be easily solved, but your description doesn't give me a lot to go on...

[Kahylan]

As for teh Locator question. Locators are completely optional, a lot of riggers create Locators first so they have something to snap their joints to without having the Mesh displayed, but it is not a vital part of the process and does not influence the functionality of the joints at all.

[hannah.moore8]

So "connect my joints" is the wording the videos I watched gave me so whenever I go into skeleton on the rigging menu to connect joints it doesn't work and then it will say something about error arguments expected 3 found 0. Does that answer your question? or that this already has a parent for the world. 

On another note I created locators and that seems to have worked as I am now able to make and connect the joints but was wondering why that didn't work with just the joints. As the assignment seems to just want joints. 

[Kahylan]

Ah, the connect joint command. I haven't used that in a while, since it basically does the same thing as just parenting the joints and then snapping them to the same location. Unless you already have bound skin when you need to connect joints, which normally doesn't happen if you plan out your rigs well.

The error message you got usually means that you had too many objects selected, since the connect joint command has very specific selection criteria:

1) only two joints should be selected

2) the first joint selected should not have a joint parent

3) the second joint selected should have a parent node above it, preferably a joint.

But I'm glad you got it working with locators!

[hannah.moore8]

Yeah, I guess Maya has this bug that is affecting joints and my Maya has that problem cause once I figured out how to make joints and connect them then the IK handle wouldn't work and I had no idea why turns out what you have to do if go to the outliner and then click/shift what you want to be connected and then click Ctrl for Pc/Windows or Cmds for mac and it instantly made the IK handle connect. I wish that Maya would fix this glitch I cannot tell you how stressed out it made me.  And thank you for taking the time to reply to my post its much appreatiated. 

[Kahylan]

Yeah, this bug is causing a lot of beginners trouble lately, but the dev team has logged it and is working on it.

Atleast going over the outliner still works, that is the method I normally use anyway, since there is less risk for a missclick.

But I hope that it gets fixed soon, since most beginner tutorials show the IK handles being created in the viewport and that causes a lot of confusion and stress.

Anyway, I wish you all the best for your assignment!

[hannah.moore8]

Yeah and that is what is so frustrating about the assignment it was huge for beginners as most in the class have never used Maya nor done any rigging and didn't talk about how clicking on the wrong thing could cause so many problems which I ran into all of them and only somewhat got the assignment finished because of how I used the outliner and not the viewport. It is honestly so frustrating as I feel they aren't actually teaching us as real beginners and making huge assumptions about what we do and don't know.