Exportable Squash and Stretch in Maya

stabbington

Hello! I'm trying to find a way to get a squash and stretch setup in Maya that exports out correctly to Unity/any general game engine.

At the moment, a lot of the solutions I've tried aren't supported by either fbx or Unity;

- deformers, ffd's, lattices, morphs or anything involving vertex animation is out (it is possible to drive blendshapes in unity but it' means breaking the animations up across two programs)
- scaling the bones doesn't work (unity always scales the children of any bone that scales, Maya always uses segment scale compensation by default, which isn't supported, so animation looks totally different anyway)
- the node setups I've tried so far won't export the mesh deformation, only the bone positions

I'm still pretty new to Maya but I don't remember this giving me as big a headache in Max or Softimage - is there any approach in Maya that will let me scale a bone or export out a squash and stretch effect on a chain/single bone that actually exports out correctly?

antweiler

in short, do your squash and stretch using your favorite solution, create follicles on the geometry (for example using this script http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/script/djrivet-mel--2 ), then constrain your joints to the follicles and skin the geometry, you want to export, to the skeleton.
Joint transformations (without non uniform scaling) is, besides blendshapes, the preferred way to get deformations into your game engine