Control a plottet skeleton with a custom rig

Rigging
1

Does anyone have any tips on how to add a custom rig in Maya ontop of an animated skeleton exported from Motionbuilder?

One solution could be:

  • Create the custom rig
  • Import the animated skeleton to Maya
  • Duplicate the animated skeleton and remove all keys (this will be the bind-skeleton)
  • Group each joint of the bind-skeleton
  • Parentconstraint each animated joint to each group of the bind-skeleton
  • Parentconstraint each group of the bind-skeleton to the group of the custom rig-controllers
  • Parentconstraint each joint of the custom rig to the bind-skeleton

This way the custom rig should follow the animated skeleton, and also be able to control the bind-skeleton. I havent tried this out yet, thought I should ask here first.

How would you guys work your way through this?

2

Are you sure that doesn’t make infinite loops/Maya allows it?

3

That would work, he’s parenting one thing to the parent and the other to the actual object.

PS: You probably want a final bind (clean) skeleton that doesn’t have broken hierarchy if you’re planning on using this for games. You can have it be clean and have each joint parentConstrained to your other bindSkeleton.