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Maya animation transfer

polycounter lvl 6
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rorozilla polycounter lvl 6
Hey guys!

I'm getting into animation right now and im running into some troubles!

Ive been fiddling with a home made rig in Maya 2012 and i am purchassing animations from AnimStreet. My issue is that when it comes to copying the animations from the purchased Rig to my own, the animtion are all wrong! But i know why, I just dont know how to make it work...

So let me elaborate:

- My Bones have certain orientation, for example My shoulder is oriented Y axis facing up, X axis pointing to the next bone. making it easy to manipulat in local.
- the AnimStreet Rig on the other hand has all its bones orianted to the world (Y axis up, but X axis facing right), making it a butt to move around in local. And when it comes time to copy my animtions, the values are all off, since some of my bones are facing opposite orientations then the ones from the AnimStreet Rig.

i dont know if this makes much sens... So let me know if i can give you more info.

I tryed making character sets and transferring animations form one rig to the other, dident work. I'm pretty knew to animation in Maya so maybe im missing somthing obvious.

One more thing, this rig is ment to go in unity, I actually tried chucking the animation in there using MechAnim to transfer, and everything is perfect! but, I want to modify the animation and I only think i can do that in maya...

So what eludes me is how good mechanim is at transfering, but maya seams so stiff in comparison!

Replies

  • antweiler
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    antweiler polycounter lvl 8
    Character sets and Trax wont help.
    With HumanIK you can pretty good transfer animations between diferent biped skeletons. As it comes to custom rigs, what I do is to create a skeleton that matches all the controls of your rig (duplicate the rigged one), constrain your controls to this skeleton, and then transfer your purchased animations to the skeleton. Then you can bake the keyframes to your controllers.
    Or constrain your rig directly to the skleleton with the purchased animations, if the layout doesnt differ too much.
  • rorozilla
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    rorozilla polycounter lvl 6
    Genius! i think this might be the solution i was looking for!! its a lot better then nothing! and it will allow me to animate the parts i want separately form the purchased animation! then I can imagine that MechAnim can blend the masks together!

    Thanks you so much! i think this will work out!
  • rorozilla
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    rorozilla polycounter lvl 6
    Ok, so i delved a bit deeper into the question and look up the HumanIK like Antweiler suggested and i wish i would of known about this 2 weeks ago.... (before I started my rig basically....)

    its pretty kick ass! but i dont have a reverse foot options, not to mention facial feature tabs, are they hidden anywhere and easy to set up?

    Sorry for all of the noob questions!
  • rorozilla
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    rorozilla polycounter lvl 6
    Ok so i found some answers to my questions!

    basically there is an option to creat working pivots withing the Human ik systeme that can help me acheive a reveres foot. But i still cant seam to find any kind of info on facial rig.

    I dont know what to do to make the facial controlers fallow the human ik controlers!
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