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Combining Game Tools with Facial Rig

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#1

We’re 3 Animation & CS Students working on a small indie computer game - and using mGear of course :slight_smile:

First of all - great tool! Thanks to everyone contributing to this awesome framework.

We’ve encountered a problem using the Game Tools together with the Rigbits Facial Rigger -
Whenever we “Disconnect and Export” and then “Import and Connect” (into a new, empty scene) - the generated eyelid joints are offset in a strange way.

This is the entire process, any idea what is happening and how can we fix this?
(we’ve tried many setups of the facial rigger with no success)

eyes bug
eyes bug2265×3086 556 KB

Thanks a lot in advance!

Yoel.

#2

I had a similar problem several days ago, but I do the process manually. First, make sure your joints are keyable (by default they might not be) so you can bake them properly. Then, what I do is to unparent the main joint (in my case, spine_C0_0_jnt), and ‘Bake Simulation’, to have a key per frame.

If you delete the rig now, the eyelid joints will move. Just select all the ‘decomposeMatrix’ nodes (you can use the main bar to Select By Name using decomposeMatrix*), delete them, and then you should be OK removing the control rig. That leaves you with the skinned mesh and joints with baked transforms, that might be what you want to export to your engine.

3 Likes
#3

Hello,

This is a known issue.

I have this scheduled to be fixed early summer
Also this one:

1 Like
#4

I see. Thanks a lot for your quick reply.
Unfortunately early summer is a bit too late for us :frowning:
Can you recommend any manual/hacky solution we can use to overcome this problem in the meantime?

Thanks again in advance!

#5

there is a few workarounds. I didn’t try it. But I guess will work.

Probably the easiest one is to duplicate the jnt hierarchy, change the name with a suffix and use constraints to drive it with the original.

Other solution is to don’t cut the connections between the behaviour rig and the deformation rig. Just split the hierarchy and export to fbx the joints and mesh. FBX export will bake the animation to you joints.

I hope it helps.

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#6

I’m not sure I completely understand -

You suggest we duplicate the “jnt_org” group generated by mGear?
And then constraint every joint in the new group to it’s matching joint in the original one?

  1. At what point do we use the Facial Rig? Before or after this duplication & constraint?
  2. At what point do we use the game Tools?

(We can program this quite easily but we didn’t yet understand the exact idea)

Thanks again Miquel. We really appreciate you being responsive and your good will.

#7

before duplicate. You also need to duplicate the facial joints . But you need to skin using the new duplicate joints.

You don’t use it with this approach

1 Like
#8

OK. thanks!

Our solution, eventually, is to use the Facial Rigger after the Game Tools “Import & Connect”.
This make our pipeline a bit slower, but the problem disappeared and the import to unity works well.

(just posting for whoever might stumble across the same problem)

2 Likes
#9

For doing this without scripting knowledge you can use Maya’s game exporter. Internally does exactly that and you do not need to set bones to keyable or bake. The only annoying issue is the root of the hierarchy needs to be at the root of maya’s scene. Game exported works perfectly for exporting skeletal meshes and also for animations. Is able to split scenes in several different animations, remembering names and where to be exported. A lifesaver in case you don’t have the ability to create custom scripts.

1 Like