Rig

 
Result of a Rig layout node

The Rig node allows to modify the posture for affected Entities, by creating a simple Maya rig that can be animated with the usual Maya tools (Maya manipulators, Maya animation curves, ...).

Add node


Rig node in the Layout Graph Edition panel

Node parameters

Parameters are accessible by double-clicking on the node in the Layout Graph Edition panel:


Rig node parameters

Name Name of the node
Active Whether the node is active or not

Using the Rig node

The Rig node allows to edit a posture in cache by creating a simple rig with the correct cache posture keys. To see the IK rig in Maya, simply right click on the Rig node in the layout and click on the "Create Rig Node" contextual menu. When clicked, the node should create a Crowd Cache Rig in the Maya view. The Crowd Cache Rig references the cache and contains the controllers of the rig.


The crowdCacheRig node that is created when selection the layout Rig node

The Crowd Cache Rig can be deleted at anytime, modifications will be kept stored in the corresponding Layout node.

The rig consists in 3 different shapes, and 5 colors:

  • the grey controller is the main entity transform controller. It can be moved and rotated, which will move and rotate the complete entity without modifying the posture
  • the green controller is the pelvis controller. It can be moved and rotated, which will move and rotate the entity's pelvis while locking feet on the ground (feet are the node that are mapped on limbs tagged as ' LEG' in the Golaem Character file)
  • Other cross controllers are end of IK controllers. They can be moved and rotated, which will affect the full kinematic chain they belong to
  • The line controllers are IK plane controllers. They can only be rotated, and affect the plane on which the ik chains bend
  • Circle controllers are roll controllers. They can only be rotated, and affect the orientation of each bone around it's main axis
  • Red controllers represents Ik chains that were tagged 'LEFT' in the Golaem Character file
  • Blue controllers represents Ik chains that were tagged 'RIGHT' in the Golaem Character file

 

Changes on the editable rig should be immediately seen:

  • as parameters in the layout graph:


A new parameter appears when editing a controller on the Maya skeleton. It contains the name and index of the edited controller, and the type of operation it performs (localPos / localOri)


The new parameter(s) is(are) also seen in the Rig parameters, with keyframes if there are. Values can be edited directly here too.

  • applied to the cache in the Maya view:

 
Editing the controller's transforms is immediately visible on the layout cache previz (the orange mesh)

Using Maya's Graph Editor

It's also possible to use the Maya's Graph editor to directly edit the bone's transforms. When doing so, 3 different refresh modes are available in the refresh mode attributes of the crowdCacheRig node


Refresh modes of the Crowd Cache Rig

  • Offline mode

In Offline mode, the rig is never refresh from the Golaem cache. It's more conveniant when fully re-animating the chacater's posture, but not if you simply want to fix some parts of the animations.

  • Live, Current Frame

In this mode, Maya keyframes are only created for frames that already are in the Golaem cache. If the time was never changed since the cache import, chances are that only 1 frame is already cached, so the Graph Editor will only show a single key:


One single key frame

But as frames are loaded into the Golaem cache, they keyframes will automatically be added to the rig:


After the timeline was played, most keyframes are now present

  • Live, All frames

In this mode, the Crowd Cache Rig load all the frames from the cache.

Note that forcing to load all cached frames each time there is a modification in the cache can be quite slow, depending on the simulation and the layout nodes.