Copying animations from one rig to another

ablaine

Hey everyone,

I'm working on some models for a mod team and we're coming across some issues with some of the creatures we're trying to get into the game. The game engine is the Dragon Age Origins engine, and I'm using 3dsmax 2011. We've been building our creatures to the existing rigs and then skinwrapping similar/already existing creatures so that we don't have to create new rigs and custom animation sets to get them in the game. This has worked fantastically well so far.

However, as we're getting to more characters that are too different from anything already existing in the game, I was hoping to pose this question to all of you experts here at polycount.

As I'm no animator, I was wondering if it was possible (and feasible) to copy an existing animation from portions of a rig over to the same portions on a similarly structured rig. For example, one of the characters we want to do slithers like a snake with the lower body but has human-like arms and we want it to be able to use all forms of weapons.

If I were to build the rig so that it was nearly identical to the human skeleton above the waist, and identical to a snake creature's tail skeleton below the waist. Could I somehow import both skeletons and copy over the animations for the upper body for all of the human animations, and copy over the animations for the lower body for all of the snake animations?

What would be the best way to go about accomplishing something this? As always, thanks in advance.

e-freak

use motionbuilder's retargeting, split the animation in two, delete the keys not used by each animation and then blend them using the story tool.

Mark Dygert

You can get this done without motionbuilder. If you name the bones the same, then you can easily load/save animations between selections of bones.

Select the torso, Main Menu > Animation > Save. Select the new Torso, Load animation.

You can also load those animations into the Motion Mixer and blend them however you need.

Personally I would urge you to use CAT or Biped they both have great tools for loading animations from one rig to another. With custom rigs, you're kind of left up to your own devices and whatever you can cook up to get working when you start using advanced controllers and your own custom rigging. Sometimes load/save animation works ok, other times its a nightmare. With CAT and biped it's never a nightmare.

e-freak

but biped is extremely limited when it comes to "snake-lower-body" and everything basically non-humanoid (in my experience)

Mark Dygert

Yep, that's why I suggested CAT also. You can create a custom rig really quickly or load a Lizard preset, remove the legs leaving the tail, add a spine, head and arms and you've got a great rig that does what you need in seconds.

ablaine

The rigs we're using are pretty simplistic. No additional controller rig or anything. I'll try the save/load animation method.. I haven't played with motion mixer more than twice but I'll see if I can't go about learning it for this purpose. Thank you guys so much for the help. If you have any other ideas feel free to toss them my way!