Transfer an animtion to a different rig (maya)

Lucas Annunziata

So, I've got a rig animated in one scene file, and I would like to have that same animation applied to a rig that is proportioned a bit differently (a male and female rig). So my question is whether there is a relatively easy way to transfer the keyframes from the male rig to the female rig? Worst comes to worst I could just hand key the animation again, but I would really like to avoid spending the time doing that.

Jason Young

Same rig? You can user the animation export/import in Maya. File>Export>animExport You may need to load animImportExport through the plug-in manager. You can do it other ways such as creating clips/trax, but this is straight forward and I've used it quite a bit in the past to transfer single animations from one file to another.

Lucas Annunziata

Unfortunately, they are different rigs, but only slightly different proportions. I tried animImport/export, but it doesn't seem to want to apply the keys to the new skeleton. So I'm thinking I'm going to try either the Character Mapper feature, or the Skeleton->retargeting feature.

However, now I need to get the the skeleton and all its components combined into one file.

Lucas Annunziata

Well, it seems that sometimes the most obvious route goes completely overlooked. I was able to transfer the animation by:

1) Importing the male animation maya binary file into the scene.

2) Selecting the the controller for the male rig, then selecting the corresponding controller for the female rig.

3)Edit-->Transfer Attributes Values

4)Clean up any proportional issues

5)Facepalm.

Mark Dygert

Motion Builder is really good at this. Once you get the rig characterized (define what is an arm, what is a spine ect) then its super easy to transfer motions back and forth between rigs of different shapes, sizes and even bone counts.

What you did works but there are times when the proportional issues will become too much to clean up.