Please help,
I am working on a six legged critter. I have created a bone chaine for the first leg and all is well. Then I duplicated the rigged leg 5 more times and all the legs are controlled by the one leg. what is the simplest way to generate six legs from the one I want to use. I also tried duplicating the rigging and attaching it seperatley to the individual legs, it was not pritty, but ended up with the same results.

Mozzenus

without seeing what you're up to …my first suggestion would be to remove from the first leg ALL the bits that control its movement…IK, channel references etc…
this way all you have is the structure without any controls
you can now copy/paste the leg as many times as you want…then just reapply the IK/ch() stuff…

OR

copy/paste the leg once and look through the new leg for references to the original leg…
eg:
lets say you have a null called “L_Leg_IK” controling the L_leg_IK_goal
when you copy/paste to get a R_leg_IK_goal…it will still be controled by the null called “L_Leg_IK”….

If you want to copy the raw bones with the IK solvers applied, you need to use the copy tool in the 3D viewport. Just copy/pasting the nodes in the network in H7.0 is'nt enough as the new IK chop is not added for you. You can select the nodes in the network while using the copy tool in the 3d Viewport though.
The mirror tool works the same way in the 3D viewport. It too will complete the bone duplication properly and create the proper IK CHOP for you.

After the copy or mirror operation, you will notice that the network is selected for you in the network pane. You can parent the root of the duplcated chain anywhere.

To position the end effector, all you have to do is extract the pretransforms (in the parameter pane for the null), adjust to the new position then Clean Transforms to zero out values.

I was able to populate a quick rig with 6 legs and four arms on a raw spine in a couple minutes with this technique.


-jeff

Thanks for your help. I will try this out this weekend.