Hi guys, I am porting as good as I can some marines from Halo Reach to Halo CE (with permutations, even for Johnson, and everything). I want to rig the mouth as well, but the mouth is closed, whereas the mouth of Halo CE marines were designed to be open. Rigging without fixing this result in the ponytail bone to go up and splash their chin in the nose, like this



Now, the mouth of Halo Reach marines is absurdely complicated, but whatever; my problem is that I'd want to adjust the position of the mouth through bones, which would be by far easier to do than to go through this delirium of rotating I am trying to do. Problem is, obviously, that if I delete the bone I used to move the mouth into a different position, the mouth will go back to what it is. Is there something I can do about this, or there is just no way beside rotating? INB4 freeze selection doesn't work

use reach rig open jaw convert to editable mesh or keep all bones and do a mocap technique.
Edited by SGT Arroyo on Jan 11, 2015 at 07:14 AM

import the idle animation. the mouth will be closed, delete the mesh and click on the ponytail bone(mouth). in max go to the animation drop down menu and click save animation. open the max file with the biped u are trying to rig. click on the ponytail bone again and open the animation drop down menu. click load animation and open the animation file u saved. then delete all the key frames. this is how i did it for the reach marines i rigged.

I did what I was told. The result ended up pretty to be pretty weird (during the "stand rifle talk" animation the jaw goes star high) but whatever, I will fix it someday. Now, what's driving me mad is the collision model. How in the hell do I make one? Every single time there is some error. I tried for some time to adapt the original model to this use, but I just couldn't make it to work. So I designed a humanoid shape from scratch with polygons (cylinders for arms and legs, cubes for the body and a sphere for the head, please don't laugh at me), so that I was sure that they did not have open edges or similar. Yet, THERE STILL ARE open edges where the shape overlaps. Why this? How do I?

Those shapes can be annoying sometimes. Make each part as a box, and instead of rigging those boxes link each one to the adjacent bone. This will allow you to not get open edges.
Also, remember to assign a material to all the boxes and turn them into Editable Meshes. If you get a z-buffered error don't worry, Tool will still compile the collision. If you want to fix it, just be sure that each box doesn't overpenetrate the others

It worked, thanks! Last thing: I imported some animations to see how were they played... sadly, I don't know how to bring the bones back to the original position. Do you know how can I do that? The armor is rigged, now I want to rig all the permutations I can, but if the bones' position is screwed, it is not good.