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Maya: Freeze rotation for ONLY the skeleton root joint?

emmix
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emmix polycounter lvl 5
Suppose you build a skeleton upside down. The skeleton has a root joint at 0, 0, 0 with its rotation and orient set to 0, 0, 0 as well. Then you put the rest of the skeleton into some pose.

How do you flip that skeleton right side up without modifying the transformation values on any of the joints? The root joint must remain zeroed out and all of the children must maintain their rotations.

I have tried freeze transformation, and that does not work because it freezes all children. They must maintain their rotations.

I have tried unparenting the root, but this just passes the rotation to the next joint in the hierarchy.

Joint orient must be zeroed out as well.



The reason:
I'm modding a game and I am trying to change character animations. I have extracted all character models from the game in multiple FBX files, one for each animation, but they are all upside down.

Each character's skeleton has several attachment joints. I can flip the character upside down in Maya, but when I put the character back into the game, it holds every item upside down because of its root 180 degree rotation.

It is unrealistic to flip every attach joint for every animation of every character, and I just see that causing more problems in the future anyways.

Replies

  • jfitch
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    jfitch polycounter lvl 5
    Well you could flip the root joint, change whatever you want in the animation, then before you export just remove any rotation on the root joint so it's upside down again.

    Or are you binding a character to the skeleton after flipping it?
  • Froyok
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    Froyok greentooth
    Put everything inside a group and rotate the group.
    Once you are done with your animation just put the root and the mesh back in place and then export.

    That should do the trick.
  • emmix
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    emmix polycounter lvl 5
    The bind pose is already set with the skeleton being upside down. If I export the character upside down I just have the same problem, because I need to flip him right side up in the game. It all ends up with a 180 degree rotation applied to the root, which I can't have.
  • jfitch
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    jfitch polycounter lvl 5
    I'm confused..so if you import the character into maya, do nothing, export again, you end up with it being upside down in the game engine? It sounds like they must have used something to flip the characters on export while making the game then...odd. You might have to change the up vector in your FBX export settings to Y- or something.
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