Cleaning multiple bind poses

A common problem that crops up in our pipeline is multiple bind poses on a character. These are introduced as meshes are updated and replaced and also as a by-product of creating modified bind poses for volume preservation (see previous post).
This used to be a real pain in the early days before I wrote the Pose Manager tool as Maya is really poor at managing multiple bind poses. However, parts of our character export pipeline and some other custom tools still require a single bind pose for a character and it is for this reason that it's important that a skeleton only has a single bind pose (dagPose) associated with it.

This is a simple script I put together that rebuilds a single dagPose for the selected skeletal hierarchy. Obviously you need to run this when the skeleton is in your bind pose which is where the Pose Manager tool comes in useful once more. Don't forget that if you have a modified bind pose for volume preservation you need to set your skeleton to that rather than the model pose.

NT_rebuildDagPose.mel

To run, select the top joint of your skeletal hierarchy and run NT_rebuildDagPose.

Managing multiple skeleton poses (model pose, T pose etc.)

Usually the skeleton will be built for a mesh in a model pose and this is also the position that the mesh will be skinned in. For constructing control rigs however, we want the skeleton in a T pose.

Also, character models are frequently updated after the rig is created and functionality can change which require modifications or additions to the skeletal hierarchy. All these modifications need to happen with the skeleton in the original bind pose, so the ability to store and apply multiple poses for both creation and ongoing maintenance of character rigs is essential.