Mirroring

Most characters have some level of symmetry: a humanoid would have left and right arm and leg, a quadruped,a left and right paws, and so on.
What this means for the riggig process is that most of the time, you can reduce the amount of work by only rigging one side of the character, and then mirroring rig elements to be applied to the other side. This can be done by using tools found under the Mirror group  tab.

This page describes how to use these tools.

1. First of all, make sure that joints on the right and left sides include a differential part in their names. Usually, it looks like this:

2. Enter these differential parts in the Original and Mirrored field of the Mirror group tab:

 

• Original is intended for the side you are planning to rig manually.
  For example, if you’re creating the left arm, this field should contain the differential part for the joints on the left.
• Mirrored is for the mirrored limb(s). In our example, it should contain the differential part for the joints on the right.

3. Select Joints elements on the one side:

4. Create Rig Elements for the selected Joints.

Now, you'll need to mirror these newly created elements.

5. Select the axis for mirroring

For bipedal characters, the YZ axis is usually a fitting choice.

6. Click the Create mirror object button

With this, the tool should create a mirrored set of rig elements and apply it to the joints on the other side:

Local Joint Position

This option is used when character’s limbs are not entirely symmetrical.

If you need to rig limbs like these without changing their positions:

1. Enable Local joint position:

2. Click Create mirror object:

Cascadeur will try to use joint names to determine joints to which mirrored prototypes should be attached.

Left: mirrored prototypes with default settings. Right: mirrored prototypes with Local joint position enabled.

See Also

Hinge Connections