Anybody out there use Granny? Set up animation state machines?

Coding
1

I hate to say it, but I haven’t really set up a lot of animation networks in my time. Mostly, I’m the task automation guy, but now I’m stuck with the task of getting our animation system to work. I’m not exactly flailing, but I’m running into a lot of difficulties.

First off, the studio I’m in is using Character Studio. I have never had to look that closely at the hierarchy for a Biped, but amazingly, the damned leg bones are a child of the Spine1 bone… not the hips… not the root… The SPINE. This makes having somewhat independent motion of the upper and lower body and blending the two together to be extremely problematic. We’re really close to an alpha release, and I’m considering stripping out our damned skeleton and going with either a CAT rig or something completely custom. (Don’t blame me too much. They were already working on this for about 9 months before hiring a tech artist.)

On top of this, we dumped our previous animation system and changed to using Granny. Yes. A month before our original planned Alpha release date.

So, I’m trying to figure out how to set up a proper animation state graph in Granny with mostly independent upper and lower body motion, and I’m thinking I need to either change out our rig, have a lot more animations authored, or both. None of this is appealing, so does anyone have some pointers out there? What were some of your solutions?

2

If all your animation is already on the biped, but you want to remap the hierarchy, I recommend building a max bone skeleton that’s constrained to the biped and then export your animation from that. That way you can make the hierarchy however you want it to be and still get the animation from the biped without having to transfer it or reanimate anything.

I haven’t used Granny’s state machine tools so I don’t have any advice for you there.

3

[QUOTE=seth.frolich;24407]

First off, the studio I’m in is using Character Studio. I have never had to look that closely at the hierarchy for a Biped, but amazingly, the damned leg bones are a child of the Spine1 bone… not the hips… not the root… The SPINE.[/QUOTE]

You can configure this while biped is in Figure mode. If “Triangle Pelvis” is checked (which is the default ), the “Thigh” bones are child of the “Spine1” bone. If it’s unchecked, the “Thigh” bones are child of “Pelvis” as you might expect. Don’t know how your animations are set up, but you may be able to get away with toggling this option to OFF ( there is one for “Triangle Neck” too which changes the head’s linkage ). If toggling causes problems, you might get away with saving out the biped animation ( to a *.bip file ) and reloading it back after you changed the toggle, as Biped will try to match the animation to the changed rig structure