Knee Bending The Wrong Way

[lucidforest]

Hey, I'm new to maya and new to these forums so forgive me if there's an easy answer to this or if the answer is somewhere else on the forum.

Situation:

I'm rigging a human character so I created the skeleton, bound it to the skin and then spent time making sure all the weights were painted corectly.

After doing that I've added an IK handle to the leg, lifted up the foot and noticed that the knee is bending out to the side rather than forward. I realise I should have took more care when creating the skeleton and had the knee joint slightly forward so that the solver would know which way to go - but I was careless.

Question:

Is there any way I can fix this without having to unbind the skin and re-do all the weights? Like is there a way to move joints slightly forward without moving any other joints in the hierarchy? Or even some way to simply let the knee know which direction to bend?

[mlefevre]

Hi,

You could try setting the preferred angle for the joints.
To do this:

Delete the existing IK handle if it has one.
Select the knee joint, rotate it so it bends the right way. (Amount of rotation doesn't make a difference, just so long as you rotate it)
Hold down the right mouse button over the selected joint, and choose 'set preferred angle'.
Set the joints rotation back to 0, and apply the IK handle.

If you want to move a joint after it has been bound, you can try the following:

Select your bound mesh
Go to Skin > Detach Skin > Options. Make sure you 'Keep History'.
Now you can move your joints as desired, without it affecting the mesh.
Then, select your joints, shift select your mesh and re-do the smooth bind.
The weighting should have been saved and re-applied.

P.S - To move a joint without affecting it's children, hold down 'd' whilst moving it.

Hope that helps.

Good luck!