Girl Problems

Some problems I encountered while setting up the game character for our mini-project, and areas which I feel Maya is weak at:

1. Editing UVs after skinning leading to UVs not following deformations. I don't understand how this problem came about, since UV sets and deformation sets should not affect each other. Kawashima-san had the same experience before, he said it could be solved by re-ordering the modifier nodes, but he had forgotren how to do it. Anyway, I managed to work around it later.

2. Adding new geometry and/or bones to already enveloped character is a pain in the a**. I added the hair geometry and bones to control its movement, and found out that it was not easy to attach them to the existing rig. But after some fiddling, I managed to work around this also.

3. Scaling characters after enveloping is also troublesome. Unfortunately, I created and rigged the girl before we decided to use her in the game. She was created using "centimeter" units while the Shibuya station was created in "meters". As a result, I needed her to be 10 times bigger. Trying to simply scale up the scene resulted in various disturbing problems, such as dislocated hair (see problem 2).

This is one big area why I feel XSI is better than Maya at character rigging, since XSI rigs can be easily transferred to different geometry and modified after setup.

In the end, all my work-arounds are for nothing. I have decided the best and cleanest way is to scale the model up and re-do the whole rig at the correct scale, which means having to create the skeleton from scratch and paint weight maps for each joint all over again. Argh!!!