How to transfer .FBX animations from one character to another?

Unity Engine
1

I’ve got two characters with similar rigging. They each have their own .FBX animations. How would I go about using the .FBX animations from one of the characters on the other character?

I’ve tried making duplicates of the .FBX files and renaming them, such as Character1@walking changed to Character2@walking, but this doesn’t work. I’ve noticed that within the .FBX files there are meshes for the individual characters and I can’t seem to change what’s inside the .FBX files - I can’t delete the meshes from a character 1 .FBX file and paste in the meshes from a character 2 .FBX file - so I’m thinking maybe this is the problem.

Could anyone please explain to me what I need to do to make this work, or if it’s even possible?

2

The only way I’ve found to do it is for the rigs to be IDENTICAL, in structure and naming, and to copy/paste the animations across from one rig to the other. I’ve done that in Blender without any problems - it’s fiddly, but it works.

Unfortunately it doesn’t help if you’ve got slightly different rigs - but I guess you could just highlight the animations from the parts of the rigs common to both and copy/paste those?

3

If you are only concerned about using them in Unity and you are using mecanim - it is simply a matter of setting up an animator component that can contain animations from either/both fbx then using it on either/both models.

If you literally want to reuse in the same fbx outside of unity - you will have to use something like maya to retarget.

4

I finally figured out how to do it. I used a program called MotionBuilder and followed this tutorial: http://cgi.tutsplus.com/articles/re-targeting-motion-capture-data-to-game-characters-using-motionbuilder–cg-15967

The tutorial video is 28 minutes long but once I learned everything it had to teach I can now do what’s in the video in about 2 minutes, depending on the differences between the rigs. Using characters with near-identical rigs it takes just a minute or two. Using characters with very different rigs it can take a bit to line up the bone structure and re-key the animation to fit the new rig but it’s do-able. Even with near-identical rigs the transfer isn’t always perfect and requires a bit of tweaking, but it doesn’t take that long.

I’m extremely relieved to have stumbled across this solution, it’s solved a major kink in my workflow.

2 Likes
5

hi, I like your post I want to learn to retarget animation, plzz help me my id skipe is MENTOLATUX

6

HELP ME MAN TO RETARGET ANIM

7

Thanks for this guide, i look forward to your game.