Rigged mesh to existing animation in Maya

DiederikV

Not sure if there is a proper term for this but here is the scenario:

I have a Character with a beard, the beard and the character are both a seperate mesh and have been rigged and skinned and everything. The problem is that I wasn't really happy with the beard so I made a new one and I have skinned it and that works fine, the question follows "Is there a way to take my skinned new beard and import it in the separate animation files so that it is bound to the existing animated skeleton in that scene?"

Sorry if this is a noobish question but I can't seem to figure it out, thanks in advance.

antweiler

If you only changed the geometry, you could create a small script (a sequence of MEL commands basically) that imports (or references) your new skinned mesh, duplicates it in the bindpose, skins it to your animated rig and copies the skinweights of the imported mesh. You can then run this over all your animation scenes.
Your case is a good example for animating on a referenced rig.

DiederikV

Thanks, I'll check it out.