Animating meshes that are separate in Maya

miketzet

Hello guys,

I have a big, but BIG question that I always wanted to ask, but now is the opportunity to do so. So, here's the deal. I have modeled a character in zbrush, passed it to maya to clean up the uvs, etc. The model a 4-armed beast that has a lots of things that are separate from his body, like horns, clothes, some details, in order to have more control. Because I am not a rigger and a animator, but I really want to animate this character, I posed him through zbrush and and passed the blend shapes in maya (Not through the plugin, i exported only the basic body model, without the horns and the peripherials, one by one). Back in Maya, I had the original model which includes 8 separate meshes, with their uvs, and the blend shapes of ONLY the body of the creature that moves the most. Just to be clear, I have changed the topology of the body models. SO, my question is the following. If i animate the body and make an animation, is there a way the meshes that has contact with be animated "automatically", like following the parent?

Thank you all in advance

throttlekitty

For static types of things like horns on a head, a simple parenting to the head bone should work in most cases. For something like buttons on a shirt, look at techniques using rivets to pin them to points on the animated model.

You can get away with using a wrap deformer on something ilke a shirt, but it's not ideal. But it does let you pose the skinned body + blendshapes without needing to also create the blendshapes on the shirt. But this solution won't work if you're going to a game engine.