Fixing Mechanical joints For Rigging

For Lawbreakers we had a juggernaut class that featured two bipedal robots. The robots had a shared base skeleton hierarchy for animation purposes. However, they had custom joints to handle the visual differences in their armor and armor plating. In most cases the base bipedal skeleton worked just fine, but there were issues when the mechanical mesh joint visual pivots and the actual skeleton joints were inconsistent. We had a couple levels of customization and we had to make sure the joints were modeled consistently to make sure they would work with the rig and animation properly.

In the video below, I go over a process on how to correct the meshes for these issues specifically on the fingers joints.

Fixing Mechanical Joints for Rigging from Randall Hess on Vimeo.

The only thing missing in the video is the clean up of the temporary joints and freezing the mesh to preserve its new modified transform. Once that is done, you can bind the meshes back to the original skeletal hierarchy.