Duplicate Symmetry

[Ces]

Duplicating symmetry on a constrained chain really messes up.
Basically I'm duplicating the left leg chain and controls, both the chain and controls mirror over, and the new(right) chain is constrained properly to the new controls but the bones point at the left chain controls and are mirrored flipped in the z axis as well.
Tried neutral pose/freeze transforms, etc but no prevail.

Also Googled a bit but couldn't find a solution, so anyone able to throw me a bone? :)

[Helli]

You duplicated symmetrie with branch selection ? Be sure your complete leg wich you want to duplicate is parented to a master dummy or model or similar.

[Ces]

Yes Branch selecting a dummy node which is the parent of both the chain root and control chain root.

[fezo]

Hey Ces;

try unchecking "Freeze negative scaling" at the Duplicate Symmetry options (by default, it's on). I had the same problem, and it solved the mess. I hope it helps :)

[Ces]

Tried that earlier, and i was really really happy when it seemed to be fixed. Until i tried to move the control object and the bones snapped back into the wrong position.

[pdelappe]

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