Parenting duplicate joint chains to transform nodes

Rigging
#1

Ok I must be getting old, been a while since I dug deep into the bowls of our rigging system but it looks like Maya now adds in ‘transform’ nodes at the flip of a hat when you try duplicating a joint chain and re-parent that to a fresh transform node. Our rigging system has always run a block of code that makes a fresh duplicate copy of the arm fk chains, then generates a fresh transform, snaps it into the same space of that joints parent, then reparents. Now either I’m loosing it, or there’s been a change in Maya since I wrote the setup as Maya now seems to add in those nasty auto-transform nodes even if the transform node it’s added has zero tranforms data itself?

I’m sure it never used to do this as frequently, is there a trick I’m missing somewhere here, failing that is there a clean and easy way to compensate for these so they don[t get generated

cheers

Mark

#2

i only see these transforms being generated when the scale of the joint has been altered, a simple freeze transform should do the trick not creating transform nodes, or you can freeze transformations on the transform node to do a clean unparent of the joint chain

#3

yeah thats what I always understood but we’re seeing a different behavior on one of our clients skeleton’s, going to do more digging!

#4

You can use connectJoint(pm = True) to parent without the transform node being created.