Skeleton > Validate Character
Module: zMayaUtils

Usage

A window will show the results. Most messages can be clicked to focus on the relevant nodes or components.

Scene requirements

Except for symmetry, joint types must be unique. Rather than setting all fingers to "Finger", set fingers to "Other" and give them a unique name in "Other Type". This allows reliably matching joints to each other without any heuristics.

All joints marked Left or Right are expected to be symmetric, with a matching joint on the other side. Joints marked "Center" are expected to be on the YZ plane. Asymmetric joints that aren't in the center should have their side set to None.

The character must be Y-up, facing positive Z.

The skeleton should be in bind pose when it's checked. A number of checks are performed to find unintentional deviations from the bind pose.

Mesh validations

• Detect nonmanifold vertices, nonmanifold edges and lamina edges.
• Only one history mesh. More than one mesh in history often indicates that construction history has been left behind unintentionally.

  Some rigs may cause false positives.

• No vertex tweaks on the output mesh. This can happen if the output mesh is modified, and can result in problems during export.
• No vertex tweaks on the mesh or on a tweak node. These are mostly harmless, but can make some operations not work, such as connecting a temporary mesh's outMesh to the inMesh of the base mesh to copy data.
• The current output mesh is identical to the base mesh. If the mesh isn't identical, something in the rigging is changing it. Most character meshes should be identical to their base mesh when in bind pose. (However, things like IK and HumanIK can cause this to not happen.)
• Meshes are topologically symmetric around edges on the YZ plane. This is tested by attempting to activate topological symmetry (there's no API exposed for this).
• Mesh vertices are symmetric in world space across the YZ plane.
• Meshes have no overlapping vertices. These are usually unintentional, and can cause bad deformations, and problems with normals and mesh smoothing.

Skeleton validations

• The current pose of the skeleton matches the pose the skeleton was in at bind time. This doesn't depend on a bindPose node.
• The geometry transform matches what it was at bind time.
• Stub joints (non-bound leaf joints) have a zero joint orient. Orient joints tends to give these a weird orientation.
• The rotation of all joints is zero.
• All joints have labels.

  This is very helpful for skin mirroring and copying, and is used for symmetry checks.

• Except for left/right symmetric joints, labels aren't duplicated. Maya may be able to figure out duplicated joints based on the hierarchy, but that logic isn't exposed to us, so we require unique labels. For things like finger joints where Maya doesn't provide enough labels, use "Other" and set the label directly.
• Joints labelled left/right have a matching labelled joint on the other side. Joints labeleld "center" are at X = 0. If you have joints that are asymmetric (no matching joint and also not in the center), set them to side "None".
• Symmetric joints have symmetric positions and rotations, and have the same rotateOrder.
• Vertices aren't weighted to more than 4 vertices. This threshold can be changed in options. Set this to 0 to disable this check.