Maya game animation pipeline

Nixellion

Hello polycount!

I'm trying to find articles about how and why this or that studio uses maya in their pipeline, but so far I only found quite a lot of Bungie's slides about their animation pipeline, and some Naughty Dog's slides about their animation pipeline. Maybe anyone knows about some other articles\slides\presentations about game studios' animation pipelines?

Also another question - why most game studios are switching to maya, what is the particular reason?

Our own studio is currently in the process of discussing this, so I want to find as much information as possible.

No holy wars, please, just objective information. Thanks!

antweiler

Maya has a very relieable referencing system (in most cases the rig is referenced into the animation scene, so the rig can be altered with animations already done)
The performance of rigged characters is good, even with more than one character in the scene.
Many animators like Maya, if you do much hand animation ni your projects.
There are great tools and ressoures for rigging non humanoid characters, for humanoids there is HumanIK, which is great for dealing with mocap data and retargeting from one skeleton to another. Its also an "easy" option for rigging humanoids.
The main reason may be, that it can be easily integrated into big animation pipelines. Python and its node based structure comes into my mind.
Another, maybe not so obvious reason, is the free availability of Mark Jacksons Red9 Studio Tools
Have a look how these tools can help your TDs to set up a pipeline that is comparable to a big studio.
For modeling/texturing alone, there is nowadays no reason for a studio to dictate to their employees what software to use, besides license cost and "politics"

Nixellion

Yeah, we currently work with a lot of mocap (almost not altering anything but timing in it, so we decided to stick with MotionBuilder for major mocap work), but there is almost as much hand animation required. MoBu, in my opinion, greatly wins in speed when working with dense keyframe data, as well as it has a bunch of HIK options and curve filters which are not available in maya or max, as well as the ability to load mutliple animamtions into one file, using Takes. But I may be wrong...

Yes, we already tried out Red9 ST, and already decided to use it in our pipeline, and expand it's functionality to our needs.

As for modelling - well, we found out that maya has no way to control triangulation, other than just triangulate a model. In max you can model in quads and control the direction of 'hidden' edges. Triangulation complicated skinning. The only solution we found by now is to skin model in quads and transfer weights on triangulated model.

Thanks for your reply!