Rig has a giant blue ball around it - HELP!

[stevannaallen00]

I am a lowly animation student using a rigged model I found on DeviantArt. This happens nearly every time I import a .FBX model/rig into Maya - it creates this messy ball around the object. It's connected to the rig itself so I can't just "hide" the selection. Normally, I end up deleting the rig and creating an entire new one, but I'm at my wits end here. Is this an issue with the rigger not deleting their history before posting it or what because I'm losing my mind!

Close upThe monster attached to the joints....It looks like that movie Legion honestly.

[zewt]

(HEEEEEEEEEEEEELP)

That happens when the radius of the joints is much too high.  This tends to happen when skeletons are exported in a messy way, like if there are meter/cm conversions baked into the skeleton.

A quick way to adjust it is to select all joints (run: select `ls -type joint`), then enter a smaller number in the CB to lower them all at once.  It was probably caused by other problems that are more annoying to fix, but it should at least make things visible.

[stevannaallen00]

@zewt A thousand thank you's!!!! This particular rig is still a bit painful to work with, but I'm so happy to know that it was such a simple solution - even for future use!

Everyone on the internet uses the metric system (other than America of course). Could this also be an issue on my end with myself being an American and having certain settings on my computer/Maya? Is there something I can change on my end to stop this ballooning effect? I also lightly use Blender (which I used to test the rig and make sure that it was actually working) and the rig came out just fine when I was working on it there...

[zewt]

Meters and cm are both metric 🙂  But some systems use meters internally and some use cm, and sometimes exporters in some software will try to insert conversions to one or the other, which just makes a mess of everything.  It's pretty common for exported skeletons to have a 0.01 scale on the skeleton itself (converting from meters to cm), but the radius settings are mostly Maya-specific, so they often aren't converted correctly.  I think this can happen when exporting from Blender depending on the export settings (don't remember clearly).

There's no magic solution, if you're loading random FBX files that the author hasn't tested in Maya then you're going to run into a variety of little glitches that you'll just learn how to deal with as you see them.  If you're exporting between packages a lot and doing your own export/imports then it's worth figuring out how to get clean exports so this doesn't happen, but if you're just importing random downloaded models then they'll usually need some cleanup.

[stephenkmann]

You can control the individual joints radius, or also use the Global Joint Size

Think of the joints.radius as a multiplier of the global Joint Size

Display | Animation | Joint Size...

[Anonymous]

hello omg i have the same problem as you! i also downloaded a model from deviantart and im at lost as to what to do. I couldn't understand what the solution was and how to do it. I'd like to ask how you were able to solve this :(( thanks a bunch!

[stevannaallen00]

Hi!!

Basically, the solution was the person above, I just forgot to mark it! But I went to Display/Animation/Joint Size and scaled it down and it does help, but for models with complex face rigs there’s still a lot of clutter. 

I've come to realize that sharing models on the internet can get really goopy because as others have mentioned during my search for answers, not everyone makes clean rigs. Also, some of these rigs are made for XNALARA or MMD. 
 
My permanent solution has been to delete the rigs and only keep the model/object. I make my own rigs now and I’ve become a better animator/rigger because of it. It’s too much of a hassle to work with some of the rigs because not all of the rigs are efficient to use. 

YET, I have had some luck importing models made for MMD/XNALARA into Blender first before attempting to put them into Maya. Sometimes it helps, sometimes it doesn’t. Most often times it doesn’t. But Blender has tons of plugins to help you “convert” files so that you make them compatible. I specifically use Blender for that. 

Hope this helped a little!

[esmeraldakruiselbrink]

CAN YOU PLEAAAAAAASE EXPLAIN WHERE U RUN THIS AND HOW AND WHERE I NEED HELPP