Hi folks,
I dabbled in Maya and 3D production several hundred years ago and I’ve recently been trying to pick up the pieces on my lost journey only to find that I’m a complete Maya/3D animation noob in 2018. Most of the tutorials I’ve come across so far to get back up to speed seem to cover one production feature at a time (as they rightly should) but it’s hard to get a sense of how certain concepts fit into a professional production pipeline.
As such, my biggest question right now is how does one create and use/reuse a “animation/motion library” or “blocks of animation” (for lack of a better term) in Maya? For example, I want to develop a series of animations where one character is sitting on a couch and talking, and has a set of gestures he makes from time to time to punctuate his statements only moving his upper body. These same exact gesture animations would be used in other videos in the series and sequenced depending on what he had to say in those videos, then possibly adding new motions to that set to reuse later. How does one go about setting that up?
As an extension of the above question, do professionals use different rigs of the same character for different purposes? Example, let’s say the aforementioned couch character gets into a fight with another character and like a fighting game, he does the same exact animation for his attacks and movement and I wanted to chain those animations randomly into a “combo” (ie: run, punch, punch, jump, kick or kick, run, punch, jump, special, etc.). Would a seasoned pro have an “action” version of that same model set up for this kind of thing, or would they use the same rig and model with all the canned animations from the couch version attached?
Thanks in advance and many apologies if these questions have already been answered somewhere I’ve missed!