Converting a rig for animation transfer

Rigging
1

Hail Tech Artists,

My current challenge is to export the animation from a quadruped rig, likely with a broken hierarachy, for use on a contigious (or unbroken), joint skeleton, which will be used in Massive (requires an unbroken joint chain).

I’ve experimented with zooToolBox XferAnim function which looks very promising and so far has enabled me to copy some animation from a test skeleton to an identical, one that I’ve rebuilt into a single hierarchy, however, thus far, a fes joint orientations have always end up misaligned.

I tried building a new skeleton, snapping on top of the test joints but couldn’t figure out the right constraints to facilitate baking out the rotations of the new skeleton.

Ideally I’m envisioning a script that will duplicate all the bones in my broken hierarchy ‘animation rig’, constrain them to the originals, allow some reparenting work to establish a contigious joint chain then I can bake out animation to a second, unconstrained, duplicate whenever I want and export that into Massive.

Any suggestions?

Hazy

2

hey Hazy

let me see if i understand you correctly.

You have animation rig and a skeleton for massive,
controls on animation rig are driving joints on the animation rig. However joints on animation rig are not in a hierarchy.

Skeleton for massive is in one hierarchy.

Can you clarify, positionally are joints on massive skeleton in the same place as are joints in the animation rig, let say in the default or Tpose?

If you can get the joints to align at some default pose then you should be able to use constraints if keeped offset option ON on the constraint to drive massive joints.

The key is to get both skeletons into the same pose and at that pose create constraints with offsets. I would suggest using point and orient constraints instead of parent constraints. It will make it easier to control the offsets after constraints are set and you might want to do that.

Yury

3

Dear Yuri,
Thanks for your reply and sorry for my delay in getting back to you.

I’ve progressed considerably since my posting and now have a different situation to deal with.

I succeeded in getting a skeleton to work in both Massive and Maya and have done a very interesting motion capture session which I am now in the process of setting up a pipeline for.

The aim is to best use and be able to adapt our motion takes, which come as FBX files with joint rotation on every joint and a mesh skinned to those joints.

To use the mocap as it is would be a very simple case of geometry caching the mesh and using that in our our furred master quadruped.

However, we will need the ability to tweak the animation which opens up a small can of worms.

My current issue is how to transfer the FK joint data onto the Controls of the original rig, where the joints are constrained to said controls, not animated directly. It could be a simple mapping issue, where I map the animation of a joint onto the corresponding Control but it gets a little trickier on the legs which are setup as IK in the original rig.

We may get away without changing the legs, they do carry (sorry for the pun), the weight of the quality and realism in the motion capture data. However it could come to them needing a tweak and, if so, I’m guessing that the IK setup could be reapplied by transferring the joint rotations onto the original foot controls. Kind of IK in reverse…

Constrain foot control >> foot bone
Bake translation and rotation of foot bone
Delete leg joint animation and re setup the IK handles on the legs
Constrain the IK handles to the foot bone

Does this sound like the right way to go?

I’m looking for an animation transfer utility that will let me save out a mapping template, so I don’t have to keep remapping from jointA to controlA etc.

Any pointers?

Cheers

Hazy

4

This could help you out with that

5

Hey Brad,
Thanks for the heads up on Red9.
I installed the module but, unfortunately it doesn’t seem to support remapping animation from differently named nodes and saving out that template for further use, which are my core needs.

I need to transfer animation from joint BN_root to control CT_Root
 and so on. Plus there are exceptions to this rule in the case of my legs which are IK on the rig and FK only on the mocap data.

However, I’ll put in a feature request to Red because I like the look of the tools and my guess is, from the functionality he’s adding, Red must be an es XSi animator like myself.
Cheers
Hazy

6

Hey peeps,

Quick update…

Knowing that my IK legs were going to require an extra step gave me an idea.

[ul]
I created an entire ‘middleware’ version of the rig, in which the joints drive the controls instead of vice versa.[/ul]
[ul]I import the rotation only joint animation from the mocap
[/ul]
[ul]I bake the transforms on the constrained controls
[/ul]
[ul]
I transfer the freshly baked control animation (ahh smell that), onto the controls of the master rig[/ul]
[ul]BINGO!
[/ul]

I hope this might help anyone else trying the same thing.

Cheers
Hazy