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How to use existing bones?

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#1

Hello!

I’ve been having this problem for a few weeks now (just trying stuff on and off) but I can’t seem to make it work. Basically, I have a few rigs made of bones and skinned meshes. I would like to slap a mGear rig on top of these bones in order to author animations we don’t have.

I can’t create new rigs because we already have a lot of animations using the existing skeletons. I’ve tried using the “Connect to existing joints” but that gave me no results.

How could I do that?

Thank you!

#2

maybe you could build an mgear rig based on the pivots/orientations of the skeleton you have, and then transfer the animation onto that rig/back onto the skeleton using the maya character palette, treat it like mocap ?
alternatively, you could just parent constrain the joints of your original skeleton to follow the mgear rig, then bake them out

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#3

I haven’t thought about the first option, I will try it out, thank you!

I tried the second option already, though through pure laziness I wanted to know what this box was meant to do and if it could simplify everything.
image

#4

Connect to existing joints only works if the mgear generated joints exactly match the name of the existing joints in the scene, right? You might have to change the naming convention or manually name each components joints in the settings to match.

#5

I thought similar when starting out but have found it better to have a separate ‘game’ skeleton constrained to the mear rig that gets exported. It has a few advantages as well, namely

  • you don’t have to rebuild the rig when you make a update
  • character artists can work with deformed sources without needing to use mGear ( they can also be updating the player model for example without updating & possibly breaking your rig file)
  • additional bones you cant remove in the guide setup don’t matter as you just don’t add them to the game skeleton
  • No option to change the orientation of joints in mGear as far as I know, so you can orient your game skeleton however your engine wants it (and again, be able to update this at any point without rebuilding the rig, having the fix skinning)
  • much easier naming this skeleton than having to do it all in guide settings
  • for future characters this technically means you can nail the game skeleton & have artists testing in game before you’ve even finished the control rig.
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#6

Thank you for your answer, I tried a few things today and it’s definitely what works better for us. I figured it was an easy and hassle-free way of doing this. Except for the fact I now have to create a script to parent constraint the joints haha!

#7

that is true haha, but it’s super straight forward & once you’ve done it once you can always stick it on your shelf. It’s literally…select mGear joint, select game skeleton joint & then constrain:

for example:

select -r leg_R0_0_jnt ;
select -tgl r_hip ;
parentConstraint -mo -weight 1;

select -r leg_R0_1_jnt ;
select -tgl r_knee ;
parentConstraint -mo -weight 1;