Trigger animation clips (Maya)

Allert

Hi Guys,

I managed to rig up my character to my xbox controller, and now he can walk around in my Maya viewport. However, I want to take it a step further by adding animations on top of the normal walking animation. Right now, how the scene is set up:

I have 2 clips (idle and walking) running at the same time across the timeline (looped indefinately). I added a little expression that will mute one channel, while the other one is playing. So, basically, i have muted my 'walking' channel, while the 'idle' is playing. When I start moving my character around, the 'idle' channel mutes, and the 'walking' channel is enabled again, untill i stop my character, and the same thing happens vice versa. This works flawless.

Now, to make things more interesting, I want to add a couple of non-looping animations to my character, which i can bind to my trigger buttons on the controller (jump, hit, etc...). I made clips for those already, only I have no clue how to trigger them interactively. Any idea how this can be done?

cheers,

Allert

EDIT: I know i should probably do this inside a game engine, but I want to see if its even possible in Maya

Warheart

..It's probably possible but it's likely to be a horribly dirty hack. Loading and unloading an animation clip on the fly while the timeline is playing sounds pretty nasty to me. I'd guess it'll be laggy at best.

Why exactly do you want to do this? If it's to test how animations play together then surely you're not going to get a result anywhere near comparable to the game engine result because the animatons won't be blended as they would be in the engine?

Allert

Hey Warheart, thanks for the reply! Yeah, you're probably right. I got a little caried away, since i managed to get my controller working inside the maya viewport. I tried getting as much out of it as possible, and got hooked somehow using expressions!

No noticable lags at this point with the walking and idle animations though. The blends also work pretty good, since you key the weights of the clips as well.

I didn't give too much thought to the applicable side of this. But I guess I have to draw the line somewhere. My plan was to eventually transfer this to a game-engine, but I might as well start with that right now.

cheers,

Allert

Warheart

Yea, it's an interesting thing to have tried to do but possibly not that useful in the long run :P.

Starting to set this up in the game engine definitely sounds like a good plan to me. It'll take long enough to get all your animations working nicely in your engine so it's probably worth investing time in that now rather than getting it working in maya and then starting again and having to deal with a whole new set of problems. It'll also be useful to force you to nail down your export process at this stage because if you continue setting stuff up in Maya you might end up with a full set of working animations and then find out that your character doesn't export correctly or it's the wrong scale or something horrible like that.

Depending on what engine you are using you may be able to set up your character action states via a node-based interface and then script that to be controlled by your xbox controller rather than diving straight into coding a character state machine (i.e. morpheme). From the little I know about UDK I suspect you'd be able to do something similar with it too.