Hello
i have a project where many animations were done using Mgear rigs.
Now we have to update those rigs with some extra joints.
I would need help: how can i automate such a task !?
Thank you for any help
What does it mean to you to automate exactly.
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You need an animation retargeting tool, or to write your own.
In a nutshell you need to specify pairs of controls/joints, that get constrained to each other as driver and driven, and then bake the animation from one to the other. Rinse repeat on multiple files.
Since both rigs are yours, it should be relatively simple. You could write a script that loads both old and new rigs with different namespaces, then constrains each control to one of the same name with the other namespace. Bake the animation and then import it onto the new rig in a new file.
To batch process it all the tool needs to have that extra capability of loading a folder of files and running the same process on each one, creating a new file in an output location.
I’m sorry I don’t have any recommendation for any specific existing 3rd party tool for this. Please share if you find one that works for you.
Good luck!
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Before jumping to that conclusion, I think it would be best to double-check @actoratwork: Do you actually mean “retargeting” Because that implies you’ve baked the animation down to a skeleton, like an FBX game skeleton or something. Is that the case?
If you have animation on the rig controllers, and you update the rig, adding joints will make no difference to the animation on the controls.
If you have your rigs referenced in your animation scenes. When the rig gets updated, update the reference, or overwrite the reference file. It should just work. Nothing to “automate” exactly.
If you are actually talking about “retargeting”, then that is a different story.
And if you ARE talking about retargeting, do you not have your source animations still saved in Maya? Because it might be easier to go back to the source animations, update the rig, and then re-export the skeleton animations.
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Thank you all!
To be clearer to what i would need:
in my case i just updated the existing rig with some new joints and deleted obsolete ones.
WIth automation in this case i mean
1 -Taking the new updated rig scene
2 - apply a list of 100 + animations (one by one) to the updated rig. That animation list could be stored as as studio library files
3 - baking each animation to the deformer joints, delete the Mgear rig from the scene -export as fbx (one by one)