Character TD and Rigging Artist, Jason Baskin walks through how to create a stretchy leg system for a character in Maya using utility nodes. there are many ways that you can accomplish a stretchy limb. Largely due to the fact that higher end applications such as Maya offer a kit of tools that provide the building blocks for bigger things.
the process for creating stretchy legs using utility nodes in Maya.
One of the ways that a stretchy limb is possible, is through the use of expressions in Maya. The thing is, expressions are always slower to evaluate. If you have one or two expressions in a scene, then you shouldn’t worry about it too much (unless they are doing something quite ridiculous). But it is important to note that expressions need time to evaluate, and if you have expressions doing things in a character rig, then it has to evaluate on every frame.
Nodes will offer a much faster interpretation of anything that you can do within expressions in Maya. In fact Maya Utility Nodes can be extremely helpful in this regard.
Here, Jason describes the process for creating the stretchy legs (or limbs) and covers essential items such as the Maya node Editor, the Multiply / Divide Node, creating conditional statements with the Conditional utility node and how to make connections with the Maya Connection Editor.
