Baking animation from bones to rig controls

Spudnik

Hey Polycount,

Is it possible to transfer (or just bake) animation that is on the bones of a character onto its control rig in Maya 2012?

Here's the scenario:
I'm animating some game characters that have animation for walk cycles already on their bones. I got rid of the animation and rigged them. Now I'm looking for a way to bring that animation back onto the character but not on the bones (obviously) but on the rig controls. It's humans and humanoid characters. Is this possible?

Thanks,
Spudnik

Warheart

The simplest way (although potentially not the least labour intensive) will probably be something along these lines:
1. In each scene where the skeleton is animated make a keyframe where you set all the joints to bind pose so the pose will match the rig exactly (you can do this on frame -1 or something)
2. Set up a scene with an animated skeleton and a rig (I'd reference them in but import will work too)
3. On the frame where your skeleton is in bind pose constrain each of the rig controls to its corresponding joint (most likely using parent constraints with "maintain offset")
4. Your rig should now be following the animation correctly so you can now bake the constraint data to keyframes using edit>keys>bake simulation
5. Clean up the scene. Delete parent constraints/remove skeleton reference etc.

Obviously if you have a lot of files you need to do this on you may want to automate a process like this via script.