How Do You Duplicate a Rigged Character in Maya without losing ?

Joshuagilbreath

Hello all,

How Do You Duplicate a Rigged Character in Maya? I can't duplicate the character and the mesh without the rigs binding getting lost.

Look forward to the feedback.

**EDIT**

I found that if I export the model and then import it, I can retain the rigged character. The only problem that I am having now is to getting the texture to apply. The mesh is all black now...

Entity

A little bit of context would be great. What would be the duplicated character's purpose? A second animated character? If so, you're better of creating a new scene and referencing that character's maya file. This way any changes made in the original file will update all of your references.

Joshuagilbreath

A little bit of context would be great. What would be the duplicated character's purpose? A second animated character? If so, you're better of creating a new scene and referencing that character's maya file. This way any changes made in the original file will update all of your references.

Gotcha, the characters will both be animated. Each character will be animated doing different actions.

I have been experimenting with exporting the character and re-importing the character back into the scene. When I do this the skin bind is maintained, although the texturing is not.

Unfortunately the character mesh has been Combined using UV Links so the UV's are not on a single UV space. (Definite lesson learned for the future, take the time and layout your base mesh UVs) I think this is the reason I am having issues with the textures not re-assigning themselves.

With that being said, how could I successfully export the character to use as a reference character?

Thank you for the help Entity,
Josh

Jason Young

No need to export it for using references. You can create a new scene and reference the maya rig file in multiple times.

http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/index.html?url=files/GUID-9E08C7ED-BF66-4BEB-8CA4-D83B34F8B48D.htm,topicNumber=d30e127234

Joshuagilbreath

Jason Young wrote: »

No need to export it for using references. You can create a new scene and reference the maya rig file in multiple times.

http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2013/en_us/index.html?url=files/GUID-9E08C7ED-BF66-4BEB-8CA4-D83B34F8B48D.htm,topicNumber=d30e127234

Cool, thank you for the suggestion. The character reference is working like a charm!

Thank you,
Josh

Joshuagilbreath

Update, the reference is working ok mesh wise. The textures are not applying. I have checked the paths from were the textures are pulling and they are correct, but the mesh is still showing up as pitch black, and the material titles are in the hypershader are red.

Any suggestions?

Thanks!
Josh

Joshuagilbreath

bump

AldousTyler

Hi Josh!  What viewport are yhou using? I've found that one of my character rigs shows black instead of textured in anything but Defualt Standard

Panupat

You dont usually do that. Keep your rigged character alone in a separat file, dont touch it, then reference it as many times as you like into your scene.

Ibrahim Aysan

You can simply select bones and meshes ctrl+c then ctrl+v it will copy under group and won't break the binding.

sharsein

You can also duplicate the character rig by importing one into your scene, then assigning a namespace to all its joints. Then you can import your second character. You can append a namespace on import. The rigs break because maya detects two joints in the scene with the same name.