Hi Ces, Helli, et al,
Related to chain mirroring here's a tip that might be helpful. I am wondering if anyone else uses this technique in their rigs.....
In the past few years I have been doing almost all my rigging for game engines which don't
support scaling (and certainly not negative scaling) so I have not done any mirroring without Freeze Negative Scaling turned on, thus no scaling in the hierarchies but also no mirrored behaviour when rotating bones (FK).
If you want your bones to mirror when animating one way to do it is to rotate the bones' pivots by 180 degrees on the sub dominant rotation axis which is almost always Z (unless you've changed your bones' rotation order to something other than the default XYZ). You can do this in the Kinematics PPG (ctrl-K) on the Pivot tab.
In order to get your bone rotations to mirror while animating FK you need to be in Add mode. In Local they will still rotate in parallel.
I've also been making rigs like this using The Other 3d product (rhymes with Schmaya). It's pretty common these days to rig this way by mirroring bones using the 'Behavior' method which flips the Joint Orient's 180 for the mirrored joints.
Anyway, in XSI this method gets you mirroring without having to turn Freeze Negative Scaling off. Thus I haven't seen the problem you're describing when duplicating symmetry with the constraints.
Anyone else use this method? Anyone have any other techniques that do this?
thx,
Peter
