WHAT’S SO GOOD ABOUT THE NEW OFFSET PARENT MATRIX ATTRIBUTE?
Jackie Denardo, Philadelphia
It feels like a long time since Autodesk added any new rigging tools into Maya. There have been plenty of extra tools for us to play around with but when it comes to the fundamentals, things haven’t changed much over the years.
With the release of Maya 2020 however, we finally have a series of new Matrix based nodes and attributes that will not only make your life easier, but your rigs will be less complex and more efficient.
There are a handful of improvements to discuss, but let’s focus on the main one and that’s the offset parent matrix input attribute. It’s only a small thing but in terms of rigging, it will revolutionise how they are built.
Traditionally, when wanting one object to follow another, so a child following a parent, you would need to use either a parent, point or orient constraint node. The problem with this is the child’s transforms would then be locked to the movement of the parent object. You could still animate the child object, but you would end up with a blend attribute node being added into the mix which then further complicates the scene.
To get around this you would use an offset group which the child object would sit inside. This group would have the constraints applied, freeing the child object to be moved while it also followed its parent.
In practice this works well but you are left with a host of nodes and connections which clog up the Node Editor, and your Maya scene.
With Maya 2020 all you need to do is connect the Worldmatrix[0] attribute on the parent object to the new offset parent matrix attribute on the child object. It’s as simple as that.
This is a much cleaner way to work, especially when building controls, because it leaves the child object’s transforms free to work with.
This one connection also drives all the transforms’ attributes at once, even shear. So rather than adding offset groups and a host of constraint nodes you just connect one attribute to another.