Having generic animation trouble. Fat kid needs your help.

Mo3g

Hi fellas. I need help. I really need help.

During three past years I worked as 3D character animator for mobile and social games. All my animation was done in 3ds Max with Character Studio or CAT. Recently I decided to expand my technical skill and turned to Maya. For the first I started to learn rigging and searching for simple bipedal rig. And here I panicked. Maya has a brilliant tools for creating custom rigs, great tools for skinning, but simple task turns into hell. It takes too much time for simple character. I’m really desperate.

I know, that it is very newbie issue, but I searched a lot of forums a find no definite answer. What I need is just simple bipedal rig, which I can fit to my character and some obvious controllers like mirroring, copy/paste poses. There are some plugins, but most of them are buggy for sure and takes a time to explore.

Ok. Here is my goal. I have this super awesome model of stupid fat kid and I have to make couple of simple animations to make him happy.



I can complete this task using Max in about 3 full working days. It includes rigging/skinning, animation, rendering.

I appeal to you for some ideas about how would you have solved this problem.

2cat

Don't the latest Maya versions have HumanIK? It includes a standard bipedal rig, which should be somewhat similar to Max's Bip. I think it's included in 2011 and up.

antweiler

When you have your model already rigged with Biped or CAT, you can import your skinned mesh with the skeleton to Maya. There are characterization presets in human IK fot CAT and Biped njoint naming conventions, however, characterizing a custom skeleton is very easy

Mo3g

Thank you for feedback, guys. I fugured out my character and made a complex rig according the tutorials.

HumanIK looks exactly what I need. Going to try it next time.