Rig Armor for Maya animation

[leoisawesome555]

Hi guys, I have an armored soldier that needs to be rigged, therefore I've been learning how to rig. Due to the fact that we have a very tight schedule for this school project I was recommended to use advanced rig to do the rigging when I have basic understanding of the rig. I have a question about this shoulder armor rotation, I rigid binded the shoulder armor to the joint I set up for the armor which is connected to the calivcle, now as you see I would have to manually animate the armor to move into the direction where the shoulder is(cannot parent to shoulder because this piece shouldn't deform). I wonder if there is a way to allow the armorplate to orient as the shoulder moves whiles maintaining its shape. By the way I am using Advanced Skeleton 5 in maya. 

[Kahylan]

Hi!

If you parent the joint that controls your shoulder pad under the shoulder joint, it should not deform any different than it does now. But you would have the problem, that it would move downward when the shoulder is moved down, which you obviously don't want here.

What you can do, is creating a pose space deformer for your shoulder pads.

Pose space deformers are basically Blendshapes that look at the direction a joint points in world space rather than local space, which prevents them from having weird behaviours when the main axis of your arm is rotated. Here is the documentation on them:

https://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2022/ENU/?guid=GUID-00699C13-8CA1-450C-937D-57C7B3DFD8C6

Basically what you can do, is creating a pose for when the arm is pointing forward, one for when the arm is pointing backwards and one for when the arm is moved up without the clavicle and interpenetrates with your shoulder pad. If you set it up correctly, this will take care of 95% of the cases in which the shoulder pad needs to move. The other 5% will be easily corrected using your shoulderpad control during animation.

I hope it helps!

[leoisawesome555]

Ok, thank you, I will give this a tryy

[RyanCameron]

I believe what you're looking for is the "Aim constraint" feature.

Here's how you can do it:

1. Select the shoulder joint and the shoulder armor.

2. Go to the "Animation" menu, then "Constraints", then "Aim".

3. In the "Aim Constraint" options box, set the "Aim Vector" to the direction where you want the armor to point (usually the x-axis).

4. Set the "Up Vector" to the direction that you want the armor to maintain its shape (usually the y-axis).

5. Click "Apply" to create the constraint.

Now, when you rotate the shoulder joint, the armor will follow the rotation and point in the direction where the shoulder is moving while maintaining its shape. You can also adjust the constraint settings to fine-tune the behavior of the armor.  Happy rigging!

[leoisawesome555]

thanks guys, appreciate all the ways, Ill give all the ways a try