Creating a harness/suspenders/belt rig

[Anonymous]

Hello Maya forum! I have a rigging question, specifically how you would go about rigging suspenders for a rigged character.

Here is a character I'm working on that has suspenders and the current solution is to skin a singlesided version of the suspenders to the character, project the weights from the body to the suspenders, then clean up the weighting and finally project the singlesided weights to a doublesided version.

As you can see it works alright, but it's a bit tricky to work with and one problem I've found is that twisting the torso leads to a jagged looking bend. It could probably be fixed a little with more weight painting but I'm curious if there's a better way. I suspect making the suspenders a separate rig with its own joints would lead to a smoother result, but I'm not sure how to go about it. I'm looking to make something sort of like this. In addition it could allow for things like animating the suspenders separately from the body, like pulling them out with the hands. I could rig it up with joints easily enough but having them be driven by the body mesh is something I've never done before.

Thank you for checking out this post and please let me know if you have any ideas on how to go about building secondary rigs like this.

[Calebos · Accepted solution]

Hello,

maybe try follicle setup. Just bind four nurbs curves(one for each stripe from front side and back side) to your skeletal structure BUT make these curves linear with just two points and upper point bind to clavicle joint, lower point to pelvic joint. Now you have the driving lines. Then create locators and drive them with motion pathes by mentioned bound curves(how many you need is up to you .. just delete motion path U value animation and set the propper value for each locator to place them along the curve). At last make follicles on body geometry and create closestPointOnMesh utility nodes. You can connect the geometry to closestPointOnMesh input geo(inMesh attribute if I remember well) attribute and locators' shapes.worldPosition attribute to closestPointOnMesh input transformation. Now you have position for each follicle with connecting UV result of closestPointOnMesh to UV position of follicles. Namely: you will drive with locators(driven by motion Pathes) follicle sliding over body geometry. Then finally you can bind the stripe geometry to joints parented or constrained to follicles.

 It maybe sounds a bit difficult but it works very well. Your harness will follow body geometry all the time.

If I have time tommorow I will attach some sample. I am at home at the moment so I do not have Maya here ...

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply and the in depth instructions! I will try using the follicle system to constrain the suspenders to the body following your advice and see what I can do.

[Anonymous]

To anyone else who comes across this topic, attached is a stripped down version of the rig. The rig it is from is definitely not final so please excuse any weight painting issues.