Advice - Maya Animation Workflow

Rogue One

Hey Folks,

I have a problem that has bugged me for some time and was hoping someone can describe the best workflow or tool that can help with the process of testing animations on a rig in Maya.

I'm looking for a simple and clean way of importing animation data via FBX  onto my rig and testing to see how it is looking then to easily restore back the t-pose and remove any and all animation data from the rig before exporting.

Sounds simple but I haven't found that to be the case and would appreciate any suggestions on how you guys approach this. 

Cheers 

antweiler

Its always a good idea to animate or load animation onto a rig that is referenced into the scene. By that you always have a clean rig file. Use a Poselibrary to test poses. Red9 Studio Tools provide the best Poselibrary and animation tools in general, imho, havent checked the new animation workflow in 2017, though

Rogue One

Cheers for the help. I had a look at referencing the FBX animation but It looks like I have problems with namespaces. It loads the rig but does not update the animation to the skinned mesh? 

Any ideas? I dicked around with the options but it didn't seem to make a difference.  

antweiler

In the fbx import options, you can choose the namespace into which you import the animation curves. This way it can match the jointnames despite the namespace.

Hito

you can use HumanIK to quickly characterize your skeleton, and characterize the FBX you want the animation from. from there you can assign motion source of your character to use the FBX character. turning it off returns your character to default T pose. Characterization info can be saved separately and loaded to new skeletons you create as long as joint names match. It's a little more setup work, but allows you to use animation fro skeletons with different namespace and joint naming schemes.

Rogue One

Thanks for the suggestion Hito. If I can get it working I would rather just use referencing as we use lots of different rigs. 

So, I had a look at my scene and tried to get it to work Robert but it still no dice. I have posted my scene below and the dialogue boxes can you tell me what I am missing? Both have the same namespace, joint name's and layers. 

The source FBX file I am trying to Reference in:



The target scene I would like to Reference into:



 Settings: 



Cheers for looking.

antweiler

When you go into the file browser, and select the fbx with the right filetype, you will see the file specific import options.
There you can select the namespace of the referenced rigand choose Merge into selected. Under include check Update Animation, which means only Animation data is imported and applied to matching joints. Under Extra you can select a specific take of the fbx,if there are more than one.

antweiler

In your scene is only the default (root) namespace which is always there and which can be ignored. Reference your rig into an empty scene, and it will be in a namespace.