Joint orient manually

[Anonymous]

Hi there,

I tried to orient my joints manually (how it is written in the Maya manual) but after I turned on the component mode and clicked on the questionmark my joints do nothing. They aren't clickable anymore and the rotation tool isn't working too.

Did I something wrong?


Greetings

[kyle.burris · Accepted solution]

Hi James,

After you go into component mode and hit the ? then you will see a local rotation axis on the joint. You can select that and rotate it to orient your joints. There is a bug that can make that axis difficult to select so you might have to drag a large marquee selection around the axis.

Alternately you can do the following. Select the joint(s) you want to orient and enter the rotate tool. Open up the rotate tool options and check preserve children. Rotate the joint till you have the desired orientation. Now go to modify -> freeze transformations -> options and make sure joint orientation is selected. Then freeze the transforms on the joint. This will bake the current rotation into the orientation for the joint. Lastly turn off preserve children in the rotate options so it doesn't unintentionally mess with something else in your scene.

Let me know if this helps

Kyle

[Anonymous]

Hi Kyle,

Thanks for your answer!
Did not worked for me too. Its impossible to select something there. Don't know why.

Your alternative workflow worked partially for me. I can rotate a joint and freeze the transform but deselecting the joint let the transform flip back.
Did I miss something?

Greetings

[kyle.burris]

Hi James,

I'm not sure what you mean by the transform flipped back. Are you talking about the manipulator jumps back to its starting position after you freeze? There are different modes for the manipulator (world space, object space) so they aren't always a good indicator of a transforms orientation.

Can you try first turning on local rotation access (display -> transform display -> local rotation axis), then try the freezeTransform workflow I described above and see if the local rotation axis changes?

[Anonymous]

Hi Kyle,

I recorded you a really short video. At the end you can see that the local axis resets.
Maybe I'm completely dense today.. sorry about that.

https://youtu.be/YcXTpjEfanI

Thanks alot!

[Anonymous]

Another question about the joint orienting... is it possible to do all orienting with the Joint-Orient-Options or are there limitations? It works pretty well so far.

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

Hi there,

I downloaded Maya 2017 and everything worked! It seems to be a Maya 2018 bug.

Thank you Kyle

[Anonymous]

I wrote a little script you can drag onto your shelf if you're having trouble selecting. Just need to have the joint selected and run it. I was trying to make it so the joint would automatically inherit the cameras rotation, so you could just visually align two joints in perspective and hit the button. You wouldn't even need to play with the Gimbal then. It was taking too much time to dig through the MEL docs to find how to find the camera transform. If anybody can make that work or has a better idea that would be awesome. 

---

string $tempSelection[] = `ls -sl`;

print $tempSelection[0];

select -r ($tempSelection[0]+".rotateAxis");

[Anonymous]

This actually doesn't work.  If you do these exact steps, freezing transformations on joint orientation will change the axis of the joint to match world space.  Instead, make sure rotation is selected in the freeze transformations option box and do not select joint orientation.  This will change the axis of rotation on the joint to the newly rotated orientation while eliminating the rotation in the channel box.

[Anonymous]

Thank you so much 😄