Animation in Maya

This week I have exported the animations we re-targeted and edited in Unreal into Maya so that we can start fixing and adding to it. Specifically adding in facial and hand movements. Because we were already using advanced skeleton rigs for our characters it was really easy to attach our animations back onto the advanced skeleton rig. After I exported all the animations out as an fbx I added them to our Maya project in the assets folder. Then I referenced in our characters and made sure we had the latest version of Advanced Skeleton. From there I just used the MoCapLibrary to find all the fbx animations I had put in the project. Then all I had to do was select the animation I wanted to be applied to the rig and bake it out. From there all the keys are on the rig and we can start manipulating them. I just went repeated this process for each animation and imported our set into each of the scene so that we can get working on them.

After all the animations have been applied and all the scenes created I have begun cleanup on the sequence I was given to work on. We are basically starting with simplifying all the curves to reduce the sheer amount of keys on the rig. And from there we can begin offsetting the keys in the graph editor to make sure none of her body parts were intersecting. After all of that is complete then I can start smoothing everything out and begin adding hand and facial movements. Then all we need to do is export her skeleton with the animation back into Unreal. Which we have already tested and figured out. Having the motion capture as our blocking animation has helped significantly with this progress. And we will still have some keying animation of our own in there as well.