Week 18: A Clucker and How To Mirror Joints Without Joint Orient

Finished the initial sculpt for a clucker, now to retopologize, UV, add detail, and texture said clucker.

---

Onto joint orients: Maya' joint orient attributes are seen to some as a nicety since you can hide rotate values in them. Others see joint orient attributes as an abomination because they are unique to Maya and obfuscate the actual rotate value. I belong to the latter group. Unfortunately, Maya does not make it easy to create a skeleton without joint orient values. In comes the following couple nifty helper functions I wrote to help with joint hierarchy creation without any joint orient values.

First up, is a function to parent joints while maintaining joint orient values at (0, 0, 0).

def parentTransforms(*transforms):
    """
    Parents transforms to the last given transform and gets rid of joint orient values if transform is a joint.

    Args:
        transforms (list or pm.nodetypes.Transform): Transforms to parent. Last transform is the parent of the rest.
        Minimum of two objects.
    """
    for joint in transforms[:-1]:

        if isinstance(joint, pm.nodetypes.Joint):
            matrix = joint.worldMatrix.get()
            pm.parent(joint, transforms[-1])
            joint.jointOrient.set(0, 0, 0)
            pm.xform(joint, ws=True, m=matrix)
        else:
            pm.parent(joint, transforms[-1])

Example:

import pymel.core as pm

selected = pm.selected()
to_be_child = selected[0]
to_be_parent = selected[1]
parentTransforms([to_be_child, to_be_parent])

---

With this new parentTransforms function, we can easily mirror joints without having that pesky 180 degrees added to the joint orient value.

def mirrorRotate(transforms=pm.selected(), axis='x', swap=['', '']):
    """
    Mirrors the given transforms across the given axis set up to be used as a mirror rotate transform.

    Args:
        transforms (list): Transforms to mirror across given axis.

        axis (string): Name of axis to mirror across.

        swap (list): Words to search and replace. Will search for first index, and replace with second index.

    Returns:
        (list): Joints that were mirrored. Note that all their children get mirrored as well.
    """
    mirrored_transforms = []
    options = {'mxy': False, 'myz': False, 'mxz': False, 'mb': True, 'sr': swap}

    if axis == 'x':
        options['myz'] = True
    elif axis == 'y':
        options['mxz'] = True
    elif axis == 'z':
        options['mxy'] = True
    else:
        pm.error('No valid axis given. Pick "x", "y", or "z".')

    for transform in transforms:
        name = transform.nodeName()

        mirrored_joint = pm.mirrorJoint(transform, **options)[0]
        mirrored_joint = pm.PyNode(mirrored_joint)
        mirrored_transforms.append(mirrored_joint)
        parent = mirrored_joint.getParent()

        if mirrored_joint.getParent():
            pm.parent(mirrored_joint, w=True)
            parentTransforms(mirrored_joint, parent)

    return mirrored_transforms