#advanced skeleton

Note: this is not a rigging tutorial, this is not a Maya tutorial. This walk-through assumes you know how to navigate Maya and some rigging basics (such as how to use groups to orient a control curve, or add an attribute to an object)

Get your model with intact skin weights and joints, because you just want to get to the part where you animate, and don’t got time to plot your own joints or paint skin weights.

It’s a good idea to put the geometry into one layer, and the original joints, let’s call them the bind joints, into another layer. Set a color to that one so you always know which ones are the bind joints.

We’ll be using Advanced Skeleton so make sure that is installed first. Hide the geometry layer and Import in the ‘cat’ FitSkeleton thingy.

There it is!

Scale it up using the circular control on the floor.

Snap the FitSkeleton joints to the bind joints and remove, delete, and add in any ones you may need. Pay close attention to the labeling system Advanced Skeleton uses; read the ‘?’ tooltips for their IK labels and attribute labels to make sure any section you’re adding or removing joints from will still work if it might interfere with an IK.

A lot of the pokemon models don’t have a joint between the ‘root’ or the ‘chest, and Advanced Skeleton will probably make something broken if you try to match that. For necks and spines that don’t have mid joints, just leave in one on the FitSkeleton for stability’s sake.

I don’t remove the ‘pastern’ joint on the front legs (that one that’s before the actual foot but after the elbow) I just put it really close to the foot joint, but if you remove it, you probably have to re-label the front leg joints to match a human arm instead? Idk, I don’t do that.

I ignore the some of the joints I don’t want Advanced Skeleton to mess with; like the asymmetrical bang and the neck fluff. I’ll make my own controls for those later.

Leave the ‘heel’, ‘toe end’, ‘big toe’ and ‘pinky toe’ joints that are coming off of the wrist and back ‘wrist’ joints, you’ll need those to make foot rolls. Turn the geometry back on and place those joints accordingly.

Check the bottom view to make sure they’re aligned properly there, too. You want them to be in the spot you want to foot to roll/rock from, not the anatomical spot.

Orient those suckers you just warped all out of alignment.

Save a new version, double check your joint labels, cross-reference them to Advanced Skeleton’s labeling system, and cross your fingers, it’s time to press the ‘build’ button.

Yeah! Looks like it worked! Maya didn’t implode and the build didn’t stop halfway through due to some issue or other. Go through the controls and make sure they all move how you wanted them to.

Using the control vertices of each control (only the control vertices, do not try to transform or scale the control itself; they all have a bunch of connections on them, and doing that will probably break 5 or 6 things) go ahead and scale/transform them into the size and shape you want. I recommend turning on the geometry so you can see how it’ll look.

Focus on one side for the symmetrical controls; Advanced Skeleton has this lovely feature that mirrors the control edits across.

Don’t forget to also do the FK controls (the little crosses are the FKIK switches)

Color-code those controls! Advanced Skeleton has a button for that, too!

Go into the outliner (which I hope you’ve been keeping clean) and find the ‘Motion system’ folder in the FitSkeleton tree. Hide it.

Quickly make some simple FK controls for those parts of the rig that Advance Skeleton didn’t make, shouldn’t take long. I usually parent a master group of them to the most stable bind joint they’ll be following; so the neck fur goes either to the neck joint they’re coming off of or the the next one before it if I want a little more control and don’t want to have to counter-animate it so much. The bang’s group I parent straight to the head joint. Etc. etc.

Go back into the outliner and turn ON the ‘deformation system’ in the FitSkeleton tree, if it isn’t already on. Turn off all other joints, you should only have the deformation system and the original bind joints.

One-by-one, go through the deformation joints and parent constrain the bind joints to them. Make sure you check your outliner frequently and maybe even the node editor from time to time if Maya sends up a warning, it probably means you parented in the wrong order and there’s a double constraint somewhere. Deformation joints will be the parent and the bind joints will be the child.

Make sure Maintain offset is on!

Once that’s done it’s a good time to test your rig and see how it’s all moving.

After this, the only thing left is the face. Make a control shape that will host the ‘eye’ and ‘mouth’ attributes. This next bit is a bit of a drag, and I use this tutorial video for it (which conveniently also has a pokemon!) EDIT: missing video :C

If you can’t find out where to access the placedtexture’s attributes, you can easily get to it if you open the hypershade window, click on the texture shader, and graph the inbound and outbound connections. It’ll be the first one in the line.

That little purple one there.

Don’t forget to constrain the face control to the head bind joint so it’ll move with your rig.

Save your file, and start thinking about either what you want to animate, or which other pokemon you want to rig, because, my pal, you’re DONE!