Organizing animations.

Rune

Hello Polycount,

I'm looking for a way to organize animations. I'm animating a character for a game in Maya, and it has a billion animations.. putting them all one after the other in the timeline is such a mess. It's taking me ages to look up where I put what, and don't get me started on trying to add an extra attack animation behind the other attack animations halfway through the timeline.

I tried to use the Trax editor to save them all as separate animation clips that I can move around and neatly organize, and it sort of works. The problem is converting them back to keyframes.
You can only do this to one clip at a time, and only when there's no other keyframes in your timeline. Hence, you need to merge all your clips into one big clip to convert them to keyframes. But when I do that, it puts a keyframe on every single frame, which is useless if I want to export it to a game engine (or at least Unity, which I'm working with).

Is there any different way to get my animations clips all in a big row in one file? Is there a way to get the Trax editor to not screw up when turning clips into keys? Is there any decent way to otherwise organize your animations?

This is driving me insane, so I'm open to any suggestions. Thanks for you time.

Bartalon

I'm working on something to solve that very problem. It's nearly finished, I'm just waiting on my programmer partner to finish the Unity side of the plugin so we can release it.



(Model by Mario Castaneda)

Rune

Interesting. How nearly is it finished and if you're going to charge for it, what will I be looking at?

Bartalon

Well, the Maya portion is pretty much done but I'm waiting on the other end to be completed. I can't really give an estimate on that. As for price, I'll probably end up making a poll thread to see what the community thinks, sort of like what the author of zPipeMaker did.

antweiler

I store every animation into its own file, except animations that belong together, like a start-loop-stop sequence. I animate on a rig, that is referenced into the scene, and have a (referenced) Exportskeleton, that is constrained to the rig in the animation scene.
Having an animation manager script to set the export clips and stuff is very useful, I have something rudymentary like that using Cryteks Maya animation Tools.