Maya Animation Rig Question about extra joints for interactions

Noth

wondering how best to handle having extra joints in a rig for handling things like carried objects, attachment points, attack points, interaction points. These should be outside of the skinned rig and free floating or still under a root bone at the origin and then just excluded from the skin binding? For something like carrying objects, I want to be able to attach props in game to them, but for something like FX I want to pin it to a specific bone, but I don't want really want that bone to be part of the skinned mesh do I? It could be a child of a skinned bone and just follow it around, or get specific key frames for an animation outside of the skinned mesh. This would be cheaper wouldn't it?

Cheers!

Alex_J

if the animation only being done in maya?

if so you can use parent constraints, dont need additional joints. Also worth looking into Animbot if you'll be doing a lot of animations - it has some helpers for this sort of thing that is a lot less fuss compared to using native constraints.

Noth

@Alex_J derp, I should of mentioned it's in Maya and being exported to Unity. I bake the animations to the bones, delete the ctrl rig and export the bones/anim

Alex_J

ah i see.

constraints probably will not be enough if it has to go to a game engine. But I dont know enough about animation in unity to suggest what to do on that end. to attach a simple dummy object really all you need to know is a location of a joint being updated per frame, so as long as you can access a joints location that should be all you need.

unreal has a concept of virtual bones and sockets which is, as far as I understand, just giving name and a child locator to any joint. I bet unity has a similar concept. This way you can attach a gun, for instance, and give it a relative transform to the joint.

if unit does not have this then adding some additional joints which have no weighted vertices but just serve as locators for attaching things accomplishes the same goal just not quite as flexible.