Maya Rigging/Physics Problem

[Anonymous]

I have a fully rigged character, and I'm trying to set their mesh as a 'Passive Rigid Body' in the dynamics (aka FX) shelf. When I try though, it just pops us with this error saying '//Error: line 0:'

Is there any way to work around this? If not, can someone drop me a tutorial on how to do a chain rig for a character? Thanks!

(By the way I'm using Maya 2018

[Anonymous]

Hi BlueBlazer!

Yes!  I know this answer as I do it every day!

You shouldn't use a rigged surface as a collision object, as you have obviously encountered one of the many reasons why it fails!

So, what you do, is create a geometry cache of your animated character.  Select all the pieces of the character, create a cache file.  Then have a copy of the character with NO rig and import the cache > Geometry Cache > import Cache... onto the geometry.

Then turn that object into the Passive Rigid object from the FX/nCloth menu.  Voila, you should now have a collision object, assuming that the geometry is good.  

(HEY AUTODESK - where are VDBs?  Geo collision object > VDB volume > VDB Geometry for collisions, then you don't have to worry about bad geometry)

C