Reusing animations/rig between various character models

drysider

Hey all! I have a project at the moment in which I'm going to be reusing animations between a number of characters. I've never done this before, just wanted some advice on how to go through with it.

I usually use CAT rig. My plan is to make a base rig, create a series of animations, and then skin each character model to the rig individually so all the characters have the same animations. Does this sound like an efficient way of doing it? Is there a way to easily copy over animations through CAT, or do I just have to reskin a bunch of characters?

monster

Is this for a game? If so it's easy.

1. Export all the anims with the base model.
2. Export all the models skinned to the skeleton in the base pose. One file per model.

It'll work in both Unreal and Unity.

Obscura

Exactly. We heavily used this on various human characters in an Unreal Engine project. Anyways, you can "copy" animations from one skeleton to an another easily, with using constraints.This is how we copied biped animations to our skeleton. At the end, it just has to be baked.

There is a clear description about how it works, in the doc of ue for example.
https://udn.epicgames.com/Three/FBXAnimationPipeline.html

The method can vary between engines, but the basic logic behind it is the same.