Corrupted Maya animations (387719)

Animation
1

Hi *,

Sorry for crossposting, but I’ve figured out ‘Unity Support’ might be a better place for this issue.

I’m having problems importing Maya animations into Unity - but only the ones with a bit fancier rigging.

Here’s how it looks like after importing:
http://www.student.dtu.dk/~s070924/AnimationTest.html
(feet, hands, eyes, etc. look like they weren’t parented where they should be, but they are in Maya..)

I’ve tried importing Maya file directly and via fbx, also set ‘Bake IK Simulation’ in Unity and even baked IK within Maya.

I know only animation basics - this rig was created by our animator, but it appears the problem might be related to some fancier controllers on hands, feet, etc.

Is there a way to import it at all? If not, what should be avoided when making rigs?

122315–4599–$animationtest_929.zip (1.48 MB)
122315–4600–$standardmb_416.zip (511 KB)

2

Try baking all contraints/IK/expressions down in maya, rather than telling Unity to do it and see if the problem persists.

I’m pretty sure that character is a rig that was made for the animation school I went to years ago… aka Hogan or Norman. His rig is rather complex and probably won’t export nicely. I don’t have a list of specific things to avoid, but the closer you can get to just animating the bones directly, the better off you’ll be. Having a multi-skeleton rig with lots of set driven key relationships or expressions is just asking for trouble.

… he’s also not supposed to be publicly distributed, but that doesn’t stop dozens of people from having him on their reel, or using him for 11-second club entries… but you probably dont want to make a game out of him. :slight_smile:

3

Well, as I said, I already tried that: I used Edit->Keys->Bake Simulation in Maya. Is there anything else in terms of baking I can do?

Yeaps, that’s Norman. :wink: Our animators are from Animation Workshop.

I asked them to give me a standard rig they’re using for animation, since it’s something they’re best at using.

It would be nice to have a list of things to avoid while making rigs, though…

Of course we’re not using Norman in the game - I’m just testing our asset pipeline and Unity fails that test so far… :?

4

Oh sorry, I misread your original post and thought you were using unity’s “bake simulation” checkbox rather than baking manually in maya. I guess there’s not much you can do about this issue.

Hopefully this doesn’t turn you off from Unity’s pipeline, because in most circumstances its extremely reliable, it just so happens that norman is a mess. He’s a really great animation rig, but he’s full of complicated tricks that (apparently) don’t get exported properly when converted to .FBX. Almost everything you’d normally use to rig a character will transfer over just fine in my experience (IK, set driven keys), and I’m not sure what specifically norman has going on that’s breaking.

I’d recommend building your own rigs as you normally would, but definitely keep testing along the way in case you stumble on an expression/constraint that doesn’t properly convert into FBX form. The only thing you most certainly can’t use is blendshapes, which might be one issue norman is facing.

EDIT: another possibility… I think norman has a number of his ‘inner guts’ locked. Like, channels are being driven by outside sources, AND they’re locked to prevent accidental keying, which also makes them unable to be baked properly. Don’t lock/hide channels while rigging - just trust your animator(s) not to break the rig. :slight_smile:

5

Ok, thanks for all the hints, Mr. Animator :slight_smile:

So we’re reverting to our original plan B - building our own rig and testing if it still imports to Unity after adding each new bit :wink: