Home Technical Talk

Importing animation in Maya

polycounter lvl 10
Offline / Send Message
Pencilninja polycounter lvl 10
Sorry if this is the wrong place to put this, I wasn't sure if it belonged here or GD.

I have a basic rig. Joints, IK handles. Controls are parent constrained nurb circles.

Due to my experience in Unity, I found it easier to do character animation in separate files and export them separately. (@walk, @attack, @die.ect) However after I completed all the animation, the programmer said he needed the animations all in one single file, as one long continuous animation.

I tried copying and pasting the keyframes on the nurb controllers from one file to the other, but it doesn't seem to make it over.

I tried baking the animation into the joints, and copying and pasting the frames over, and likewise, it breaks the rig.

I feel like there should be an easy way to import the animation onto the skeleton so I can merge all these separate animations into one, but Maya is guarding this secret closely.

Replies

  • Warheart
    Offline / Send Message
    Warheart polycounter lvl 17
    Why does the programmer need all the animations in one file?

    The fact that the unity documentation suggests this is a good way to work (I have read this myself) is astounding imo. If you're working on a large scale game with more than one animator that is just completely unworkable.

    If it must be compiled into one animation I would do it as a scripted process that baked all the source animation onto the export skeleton joints and then transferred all that data into one file which contained only the simple skeleton with no IK and no control rig. However this is not a particularly simple script if you haven't done any of it before.

    But seriously... it's just a bad way to work. I would want a _very_ good reason to go to the effort of doing that.
  • sub_roland
    Offline / Send Message
    sub_roland polycounter lvl 12
    seeing as there wasn't another post on this and being almost a year old i am guessing it has been solved. But anyways I use the paie script for exporting out animation from one file and importing it onto another file. http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/animation/c/paie hope this helps somebody
Sign In or Register to comment.