Re-using rigs, poes and clips

[FloydBishop]

This is easy to do, and one of Maya's strong points. Go up to High End 3D:

http://www.highend3d.com

and look for Pose to Shelf and dkAnim.

Pose to shelf will allow you to save out poses you come up with for your character and save them to a shelf. You can then do a search and replace (swapping the name of one character for the name of another) to apply that pose to the clone character.

DkAnim does a similar thing but with animation files.

For example: You have two cats, Lion_1 and Tiger_1.

In a text editor, do a search and replace for "Lion_1" and swap it with "Tiger_1". This will make it so your finished animation/poses work on the new character, taking things like the joints, controls, etc and changing them from things like "Lion_1_headmover" to Tiger_1_headmover", keeping all of the keys intact.

Thins kind of technique is awesome for crowd animation, or on a project where you have several similar characters that need to be able to do similar motions, like walks, runs, etc.

Good luck!!

[tropistic]

And while you're at highend, check out "ultraPose." Can do alot of what you're looking for, including export/import animations based on controls and/or skeletons - and not in that nasty keyframe-on-every-frame .mov format. No offset (yet) but maybe in the next version?

And Jason's second DVD has some scripts that really nail down control based referencing. Cool workflow, that one.

[nemirc]

Maybe the simplest answer of all:

Tell me you turned your rig into a character and then you tried to use the Trax Editor :bounce: :rolleyes:

As for duplicating the weights: You can use the Paint Weights Tool to export all the weights. It will save A LOT of image files (one for each bone) which can be reused.
Just remember both characters must have almost the same UV texture coords.
You can also import your second character, then bind it to the same rig and then use the copy skin weights command (not sure about the command name, but you get the idea).

[erik2003]

Thanks guys, awesome!

As a matter of fact i did try to find stuff on this in the help files and did try out the viewers but i never got the renaming of the chars down. So its done in a text editor ;-) i love unix


Thanks!

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