i have imported a mesh from mudbox into maya. how do i give it a basic skeleton? if you know any links that can help me with rigging i’d also appreciate that too

If you are using Maya 2011, there is a new menu in Animation -> Skeleton, called “Human IK...” that contains a tab “Skeleton Generator” which will create a standard skeleton for you with options for roll joints, number of fingers/toes/spine joints and so on.

Use it to create a new skeleton, and to scale that skeleton (there is a slider there) to fit your mesh. You can use the resulting skeleton with FBIK if you remove the “HIKCharacterNode1_” prefix from all of the joint names (select them all and use the Comet tools Rename plugin to do this with minimal effort).

Once you have the skeleton added, select the mesh and the root joint and use Skin -> Bind Skin -> Smooth Bind [options] to add a skinCluster to bind your mesh to the skeleton, and you’re ready to animate.

Well… generally, for really good results you will need to paint or otherwise tweak the weights in your skin cluster, especially around the shoulders. Getting professional level results takes some practice, that is why riggers and animators get paid the big bucks. :)

<* Wes *>

thanks Wesley,

I am extremely new to maya,

i have Zero education with this program. Thank you for a quick response
and please excuse my questions if they seem obvious.

No need to apologize. I recently talked to some CG professionals and many were suprised to learn about this feature in Maya 2011.

The default pose for the HIK skeleton is the standard “T” pose, while the default human mesh in Mudbox has the arms and legs in a more relaxed pose. You can get usable results from this, but you have to adjust the arms and legs of your skeleton to match the mesh pose. While it adds a little more to the learning curve you have, I would delete the right arm and leg joint chains, rotate the left arm and leg to fit to the mesh, and then use the Skeleton -> Mirror Joint function to recreate the right arm and leg such that you have full symmetry.

Why use the left side? That is just my preference, the opposite way should be fine.

There are also a lot of rigging plug-ins and scripts around, many on a site named Creative Crash. Many are free, some are not, but none I have seen require any less work than what is already built into Maya.

<* Wes *>

Another issue with skeletons.

are there skeletons already preset with weights?

Duh… answered my own question. Disregard.