Some parts skipped over in tutorials

[Priest]

Maybe I'm just inexperienced, but there have been a few times a DVD will say "before I begin I just did so and so" - which is fine, only I have no idea how to do what they're talking about.

I'm watching the Puppet Rig series and he stressed the importance of dividing the joints of the shoulder, elbow, and wrist perfectly even. Is there a script or something that does it for you? I'm pretty sure if I do it manually it won't be evenly spaced.

[shoot]

Hi,
I did it like that:
- unparented the joint where I want to place additionals inbetween
- created the additional joints (not connected to any other, just the single "joint-sphere)
- parent-constrained the joints to the first and last joint
- in the constraint-node I set the influence how strong the new joint is related to the others (in my case I added 3. So the influence sums up to 3+1).

Example:
forearmA: 3 to shoulder, 1 to ellbow
forearmB: 2 to shoulder, 2 to ellbow
forearmC: 1 to shoulder, 3 to ellbow

Finally deleted the constraints.

Hope that was usefull.

[Rokit]

Here's a tool. Really easy to use, and works with Maya 2011. One of the reviews said it didn't orient the joint to the child, but it worked fine for me.

http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/do...joint-splitter

Also, in case someone finds this who doesn't know how to bind the skin to the skeleton, just select the skeleton root, select the mesh, and go skin > bind skin > smooth bind with default settings. That's what I did anyway.

I wish he would not have skipped these details as I am completely new to rigging. Been a great learning tool otherwise though.

[Justin3d]

Unfortunately the Puppet Rig DVD requires 2 downloaded scripts to work as it's described on the DVD. Both links listed on the disc seem to be broken. If you dig around the internet, they can be found. It's a great DVD otherwise. It's just too bad that they didn't bother to include all the required support material on the DVD.