Several bones in a typical biped skeleton are mirrored by another bone on the opposite side of the body. For example, the right upper arm is mirrored by the left upper arm, the right foot is mirrored by the left foot. Many skeleton naming conventions assign identical names to these mirrored bones, except for a part of the name that indicates whether it lies on the character’s right side or left side. For example, the right forearm is Character_R_ForeArm, and the left forearm Character_L_ForeArm.
If the naming convention you use in your skeleton follows this kind of standard, you can use mirror matching mode to map mirrored bones automatically. (See Define an existing skeleton for HumanIK.)
To activate mirror matching mode
- Do the following:
- Click
in the Definition tab toolbar.
As you map bones with mirror pairs on the opposite side of the body, the tool checks the name of the selected bone to see whether it contains any of a preset list of substrings commonly used to indicate that a bone lies on the left or right side of the body. If it finds one of these substrings, it looks for another bone with the same name as the current bone, but with the mirror pair substring corresponding to the other side of the body. If that bone is found in the skeleton, it is automatically mapped to the corresponding node on the other side of the body.
For example, if you map the right elbow node to a bone named Character_R_ForeArm, the Definition tab toolbar replaces the R_ with L_, and maps the bone named Character_L_ForeArm (if it exists) to the left elbow node.
- Click