Maya Animation :: Fast Way To Duplicate Rigged Characters In One Scene
Jun 30, 2011
In my scene i have a fully rigged character, with a walk cycle animation on him. what i would like to have is a row of characters walking around. (kind of like how you see military soldiers walk around while in group). The part that is giving me the most trouble with this is getting multiple copies of the same character into my scene.
What i have tried and failed with:
Grouping my full rig and then duplicating.
making instances of my character and messing around with particles.
i have made multiple attempts at trying to use duplicate special.
the only thing that seems to kind of work is making a scene with just one character and importing it into my main scene and changing a bunch of stuff around. with the amount of copies i need this workflow just feels really degrading and tiresome.
I'm supposed to model from scratch or find a pre-rigged model for some animation. I found a free rigged dog model for Maya [URL] .... that will fit my story perfectly, but I want to be able to change some of the geometry of the model, like modifying the ears and tail. But I can't seem to figure out how to do that! I'm able to select parts of the dog and move it around, but I don't know how to actually change the model itself. And if I do so, will it mess up the rigging? How do I go about editing this model?
I am currently making a dragon and want to drive the animation of the wing membrane with nCloth dynamics.I have seen examples of this being done, I just can't figure it out.
it seems that i've got myself stuck on the eyelids. I've made a Stickman for animation training because animating interests me. After rigging the whole body and creating the face controls i bumped into a problem i just can't solve. That problem is the eyelids. I've been trying to animate the eyelids to close and to open.
Big problem = Eyes,
they are to big and stick out a lot which prevents the eyelids to close correctly. I've been wondering how they do this in movies and games where they have big eyes but the eyelids close perfectly
So I hired a character rigger to rig a model for me, but now I need to update the model. Since it's a more stylized character, I thought that I could get away with a single polysphere for each eye. Now however, I've decided that in order to improve the look of the eyes I'll need to compose it of separate pieces (cornea, iris, pupil).
Here's what I had planned on doing:
1. Change the material attributes on the polysphere to be shiny/more transparent and use it as the cornea
2. Then constrain/parent the iris and pupil to the polyspheres so that they follow properly as the eye moves
I thought that this would be a good way of updating the eye without really messing with the rig, but I haven't been able to get it to work.
My questions are:
1. What's the best way to add the new pieces to the rig so that the eyes continue to function properly and how do I do it?
2. There's another method that I found online for procedurally texturing eyes that works quite well, but it requires the use of nurbsspheres. If I follow this method instead, what's the best way (if different from question #1) to either constrain the nurbsspheres to the polyspheres, or to completely replace them in the rig?
I've sent an e-mail to my rigger requesting these changes, but I was just curious for everybody's input for personal learning purposes.
I am working on (yet another) minecraft character rig xD
So i have set up a facial control panel, using blend shapes and driven keys, but i need it to follow my character. If i parent it to the head, i doesn't follow when i grab the skeleton and move the character around, and if i bind it to the neck joint, i am not able to use the control panel, because the movement of the controls are locked, since they're binded to a joint.
The idea is to have hand drawn characters (our actors) in many different poses,actions and with different expressions,just like in that video.
What I need is the way to easily and fast switch between different drawings.Some kind of a library where I can just click on a picture and it will change to that one.Drawings will be on a simple plane with alpha transparency.
how to add motion blur when drawings are switching
I have a character with animation. Another character is the same(same bones, meshes), but with no animation, 100 times larger in size and I resize the head to make the head looks slimmer. They are saved in different fbx files and I imported them into mb scenes. I select the root bone and "select hierarchy", the export options is shown below. Then select in the same way in the larger character's scene, the importer options is shown below. THE PROBLEM is: after I import the atom, the character becomes shrinked to the same size as the former one and the ratio of head becomes the same as the former one too.
I am working on a rig right now and I'm trying to do the Isner Spine from the Body Language Advanced 3D Rigging Book.
I did the Spline IK with the spine and I have everything stretching fine but when I made the CVs into clusters and parented them to the controls, when I got to translate the rig, whether I use the Root CTRL, Main CTRL, or whatever, the spine translates twice as fast as everything else. The clusters and everything in the lower body moves normal and everything about the head is moving normal..
I know in other situations with curves you have delete history but I can't delete history on the joints and I can't come up with any solution. I can attach a file.. not all the controls are done right now and I haven't reparented the wings correctly so just ignore that.
I'm new to Maya 2011 and simply put, I need to know the basics of animating a camera around a scene, along a path, slowing down and speeding up, how to move the point of interest, that type of thing.
I'm trying to use the same interactive skin capsules for multiple characters. Because the characters have different geometry I can't simply copy the weights. Is there some way to copy the capsules used for interactive skinning to a new model?
I have a hard time copying/pasting graph editor curves from a scene to another, since it`s only a specific part of the timeline, is there some basic rules that are to be observed for things to work properly? Yes after a thousand tries i`m going to have to edit every darn ecking curves accordingly to those i wanted to copy.
I have several art assets that I have already rigged, skinned, and animated. Unfortunately, the objects have to be re-sized.
There isn't a simple way to simply scale the rigg to match the new size, because then the transforms are incorrect, and the scale on the bones are no longer at 100%. Normally it wouldn't matter, but these objects need to go into a game engine, so it has to be at 100%
No, simply re-sizing the rigg and hoping to just 'reset scale' will not work either.
Save/Load animation will inherit the pivot points of the original animation and paste them onto the re-sized objects, so that does not work either.
Is there a way to transfer a rigg and save it's animation when an object gets re-sized? I'd figure that Autodesk would have made some kind of feature for this scenario, since in game production things will inevitably be scaled at some point.
It's easy to scale everything to it's new size... the problem is... how do I reset it's transforms without the rigg going bonkers?
How do I take the original animations and re-apply them to the newly scaled down version?
In After Effects CC/CS6 how do u copy a scene and unlink it from the orginal source? It doesn't matter if I copy or duplicate a scene, it will also change it in the original..I have some text I want to change in the copied/duplicate scene, the rest I want it to be the same.
I've been playing with Scene Referencing, and have a question about skinning. Is the ability to bind a mesh that is part of an Assembly Reference something that will be coming in a future release? I'd like to be able to bind both a high-poly and a low-poly mesh to one rig using scene assembly. That way I can swap armor parts, weapons, etc on one rig without cutting/pasting animation between rigs.
I've attached a picture of a sample of what I'm referring to. If that isn't workable, any other workflow that is comparable?
New user to Maya here. I recently have been working on some scenes at the office and found out afterward about Maya's Projects settings and auto creation... Needless to say, my current files are now not part of a Project.
Is there any way to take the currently open scene and export it as a new Project or Gather the files from a scene and build a new Project without having to do it manually?
Why the Plane disappear when open New Scene? I try to adjust the Near Clip under Camera, it works but what could have made this happen (I mean Plane/Grid suddenly disappear?)
Not sure if the following would be the reasons: Recently I have tried to open files related the Maya sample file (tutorial disk)but I can't open it directly from the CD. I noticed that there might be some tricks that I have to same the file as an ASCI file and the open in Wordpad, then I could successfully open that. So I try to copy the Tutorial files in the CD to my Harddrive. When I open that from Wordpad, it works!. I am not sure if that could be the causes of my proble (ie. Plane/Grid disappear), or I might have done something which I am not aware of? Also, those axis arrows seems so long and I need to adjust that (I mean the arrows extend outside the Plane/Grid).
I want to put multiple people in the scene. So I'm trying to import people.fbx into the scene. It succeed at the first time. I grouped the meshes and skeleton and name it in name people1. But I can't import the same people.fbx again. Is there any way to import one .fbx into the scene for multiple times?
We make a small Animation Movie and from time to time we stumble upon strange behaviours of the referencing pipeline.
There is a Kitchen that will be the scenery for the Movie Scene Set up: all models i.e the toaster, the fridge ansd so on are modeled and saved.then in the Kitchen File we have an empty scene where all the objects are referenced in. thats the "model master"scene.now we referenced the toaster_model into toaster_shaded, did all the shading and changed the references in the kitchen from toaster_model to toaster_shaded.
On some objects we noticed, that the updates made on the models for examlpe if we scale up the toaster on 2 and freeze transforms afterwards, the change is not updated in the Kitchen file. But after a few days the update works...
how can i import anything into my scene without adding those suffex into each geometry or node existed in the imported scene..sometime i have to import scene which has alot of nodes any geometry into another one, but i'll fall in many troubles like renaming anyman more which is inconvenent at all.
Trying to animate an scene with a boxing match, and Im trying to figure out how to make the character deformation happen without using reactor if at all possible.. example everytime a punch is landed I want the character skin to deform from the other character's mesh(make sense). but if I can make this happen from viewport instead of relying on reactor it.
When I merge an animated camera from another scene, the movement setting keys for the camera and target are there, but it appears that animated exposure settings are not. Is there a way to import those with the camera, as well?
The scene is a 100 meter dash. I have animated one biped character and would like to add four more characters, identically dressed but in different lanes.
1) How can I duplicated the character? 2) how can I get the animation to be specific to each lane? 3) Can I vary the speed using Time Warps in Mixer?
i've got an animated character and have just realised i need to put a watch on his wrist! I've created the watch but how do i get it to follow the wrist? i've tried using motion paths but the watch doesn't rotate to follow the wrist.
I'm trying to create 3d text of asian characters. I do:
Create->Text Set Font to: Meiryo Set Writing System to: Japanese Set Text to: イ Press Create Button
but any Asian character I enter in the text field get converted to a "?" question mark when I press "Create". Is it possible to create Asian text in Maya?
