Visualizing joint orientation

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There are times when you will want to be able

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to see a joint orientation without having to select it

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to do this, select the joints

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and go to display,

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transform display local rotational axis.

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We can now see which way each axis is orientated.

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What this also allows us to do is go in and

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manually adjust each axis rather than it being done automatically.

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There are plenty of times you will need to do this because the

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mayor tools don't always get the joints access pointing the way you want.

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You will see this as we build the creature's skeleton.

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What we need to do first is switch to component mode

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using this button here.

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Now move over to the miscellaneous components button.

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This is the one that looks like a question mark

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and right click,

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select local rotational axis.

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What this allows you to do is select the axis itself.

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It will turn yellow when selected,

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you can then adjust it like. So

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let's say we need it to point more in this direction.

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So you can see that the orientation has been changed

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and we can rotate it around a new axis.

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This does leave us with a problem though,

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if I select the root joint,

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you will see that the rotation and translation axes both match

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even the scale axis is the same.

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If we zoom in a little,

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you can see that we change the rotational

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axis but the translation axis hasn't changed.

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So it's different.

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So this and the scale axis need updating too or it will cause issues with the rig.

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If I look at the joints attributes,

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you can see here there is now a value of minus 57 on the rotate axis.

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This is essentially an offset we added when we edited the axis

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having this value here isn't ideal. Like I said, it can cause problems with the rig.

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But more importantly, when the skeleton is exported to a game engine,

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the animation won't come through correctly.

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So we ideally need to clear this value,

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maintain our orientation

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and also make the translation and scale axes match the new orientation.

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The problem is there is no magic button or tool to fix this. Yet in Maya

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on the bright side, it is a very easy fix and all we need to do is use a bit of mel script,

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open the script editor.

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Now, don't worry if yours looks different to mine.

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I prefer to use a plug in which enhances my script editor.

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This is because I do a lot of scripting.

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All you need to do is type

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joint

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minus E

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minus zso

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all this is going to do is edit the joint and reset its scale orient,

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which will also reset the translate axis to

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if I select the code now press enter to run it with the joints selected.

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You see the translation axis resets to match the rotation. One

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that fixes the problem.

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The scale axis is corrected too.

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We have also zeroed out the rotate axis values too.

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So the joint is now clean and tidy and ready to be passed to a game engine.