Hey guys, I’m about to tear my ears off because of this:
We need to get some animations from one source, bring them over to a new skeleton, and export them.
Sounds easy though, but here’s the workflow:
Take the obsolete character in 3DS Max, bring it into motionbuilder, set it up and retarget it back into a motionbuilder file, then once that is retargeted, we bring it back into max.
Tell me if there is a simpler way to do this, but right now I’m about to lose it.
Here are some extra things that have been making it super frustrating:
A) We are using biped
B) There are crucial bones that are outside of the biped that don’t follow the hierarchy.
Can’t you just do the retargetting inside of Max? We retarget skeletons all the time with custom scripts in Maya, it’s just setting up parent constraints or aim constraints depending on how different the rigs are
I am happy to talk with you about your motionbuilder issues. what version of the software and plugins are you useing?
the extra bones, are they just parented on to the biped skeleton? and do those new bones exist in the new skeleton your trying to get it on to? ( are you loading it back on to biped?)
If you have a lot of animations you can batch them using your original method. A tools programmer should be able to write this for you in a few days (ours did):
Export the old biped and new biped/skeleton as FBX and load into MB
Set the retargetting scene so that the old drives the new
Batch convert all your old biped animations to FBX
Batch import all the FBX animations into MB onto your old rig
Save the retargeted animation as FBX, plus if you want to use it on a biped, as BVH
In max, I like to convert the BVH to BIP. You can do this on any biped, just load them on and save as .BIP
The non-biped bones - are they expression driven from the biped, or hand keyed?
If hand keyed you might be OK, but I suspect you’d probably have to bring them in a .FBX, select, save as a .XAF animation and then load that onto your new bones.
not 100% sure, they worked alot on getting the new plugins to just load back right on to biped but I am guessing its based on names for matching things like the rest of the load backs. Just used to be that FBX could not write to Biped correctly and so the hamstrung bip, bvh implementation was the only way.
I’m working on the same thing at our place, incorporating MB and Max into a pipeline, and so far I’ve ended up using a similair method, which isn’t exactly the most straight forward way of doing things.
I’m interested in whether or not MB is even necassery for retargeting animations, as I’ve heard of many people retargetting animations in Maya.
Is it possible to retarget animations in Max in the same way?
I would use biped to do your retargeting, if you are going from biped to biped. If the non-biped bones are not hand-keyed, and instead driven by expressions or some other form of simulation, just set up those relationships on the new rig.
If the extra bones are hand-keyed, you could try storing their relative-to-biped-parent transforms and load those back onto the new rig…
If you have large amounts of data to retarget and work on cleaning up I could be faster done in Motionbuilder knowing what your doing. But if the files are all ready in max and on biped then the strait line would be biped to biped and depending on the type of motion that will be fine.
@Bad, you can retarget to a very limited extent in Maya and with Max depending on the rig or system your useing you could stay in max…
All that said, having a working Mobu pipeline is a very powerful option to have if your working on a large move library.
Cool thanks guys for all the help. We’re currently using MoBu 7.5 and 2009 right now. I overshot this task and all I needed to do was change a hierarchy, nothing more. I appreciate all the help though.