Spine Clusters Breaking When Scale Down

Rigging
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#1

Hi everyone!

I’m sort of new to the rigging side of animation and a mentor of mine suggested reaching out for help on here, so, here I am! I wish I could just attach my Maya file onto here, but hopefully the pictures will suffice.

When I scale my rig down, I am having the issue of the clusters moving backwards which then distorts the spin (and even the face a bit, but that part might be paint weights). Didn’t know if anyone has seen this issue before and has a solution! I have included the outliner view in my screenshots if that helps any.

I appreciate any feedback and help I can get!

Thanks!!

Screenshot (3)
Screenshot (3)1920×764 107 KB

#2

A few questions to ask:

  1. How is the scaling mechanism set up?
  2. Are you scaling everything uniformly? Problems like that frequently appear when scaling non-uniformly.
  3. Have you tried putting everything under a single heirarchy? It looks like you have six different heirarchies.

After checking all of that, it looks like you have some history playing into it. One thing you can do is look at the inputs. Highlight your IK spline and hold the right mouse button. In the menu, go to Inputs->All inputs. That will give you a dialog where you can see the inputs that affect that node. You can also change the order that they are applied. I would also do that with the clusters handles and see if you can tell what’s controlling their position.

If you need to adjust your scaling mechanism, make sure to set it at 1 (unscaled) first.

1 Like
#3

Looks like you might need to apply a multiply and divide node to take into account your global scale.

You can do this first by getting the length of your IK spline. You need to create a curve info node by opening the script editor and typing “arclen -ch on;”. Once you have created this length node you need to connect it to a multiply divide node using the Node Editor. You plug in the CurveInfo1 ArchLenth to the input 1x in the multiply divide node then copy the number from input 1x and paste it into 2x. Make sure your multiply divide node is set to divide. Connect output 1x to your scale X of the joint (or whichever direction is your main direction).

Let me know if this helps!

1 Like
#4

Thank you for the reply and advice! I was able to fix the rig - it was actually a super simple fix (of course). My spine attributes just weren’t scaling because they weren’t connected to any of the scale attributes! Thank you again though and I will look at for this in the future and keep it in mind if I have any other issues! c:

#5

Thank you for the reply and advice! I was able to fix the rig - it was actually a super simple fix (of course). My spine attributes just weren’t scaling because they weren’t connected to any of the scale attributes! Thank you again though and I will look at for this in the future and keep it in mind if I have any other issues! I’ve never messed with the Node Editor before so thank you a lot for explaining what exactly to do! c:

#6

Glad you got it figured out. Some of the hardest rigging/coding problems I have encountered were super simple fixes (once I found the problem).

#7

Fantastic! Glad you were able to sort it!