Applying existing rig to another model

armagon

I have purchased a model pack that contains a model, it's rig and some animations. It's a complete .max file. However, i also want to apply the same rig, and the same animations, to another model. Is that possible? Can someone point me to some video tutorials on the subject? Thanks!

monster

I would solve this differently depending on how you are working.

Do the characters have the same proportions? Is this for a game engine? Which engine?

armagon

Yes, they have the same proportions. They just have different body armour, helmet, etc. The engine doesn't really matter. I have the complete max file for one file, with animations as well, and i want to apply the same rig and animations to other character i have, max as well, in T-pose.

The character is almost the same, except that it has a helmet and "slimmer" body armour.

headd

A solution is the SkinWrap modifier.

A related thread is here: http://www.polycount.com/forum/showthread.php?t=57606

monster

I asked about the engine because Unity and Unreal have retargeting features so that the proportions of the models don't need to match, only the bone counts. If your models were different I would have described that process.

As headd said, the Skin Wrap will transfer the weighting over.

armagon

Can i use Unity's or UE's re-targeting and then export the rigged FBX?

monster

I'm sorry I don't mean to confuse any issues here. You don't need retargeting since your models are the same. Just apply the same animations to both in engine.

armagon

Does MotionBuilder have tools to assist in this kind of animation retargeting?

armagon

Maybe an auto-retarget? lol.

GlowingPotato

Hey armagon.

If you try motion builder, you can try the humanIK system to re-target the animation.

For the rig, if your character have the same proportions as the source character, you can roughly place the skeleton above it, and adjust the arms, legs, spine position, and then skin the character, but this requires some rig desctruction/construction.

I have done a lot of reusing and rigging. My personal opinion is:

Write a script to rig a general character using "locators" to define joints.
Then use a tool like humanIK to re-target animations.

Reusing rigs works, but there is a lot of little things to care about in this process, so, i recommend writing a script to do so, then re-target.

Right now i'am working on a project with a lot of characters and animations, The first thing i did, was to write the rigging script. This way, in just an hour i have a fully rigged character, no matter the height, size, proportions.

ZacD

Softimage also has a tool called GATOR that does this along with transferring UVs, materials, and vertex colors, if you want.

armagon

Will the humanIK system rewrite the skeleton, or keep it the same? Basically, i just want to reapply the same rig to various similar models so i can use the same animtions. Do you have any articles about that kind of rigging scripts?