I want to add new animations to a FBX file that no longer has bones. My question is how can I do this without loosing my old animations? I have had 2 different animators update the FBX with new moves, but both of them never gave me the rig file they created nor do I know how to tell my current Rigger how this is done.
Does anyone know how I can add new animations/rig to my 3d model without loosing the old animations?
if your model is animated then it does have bones otherwise you shouldn’t be able to play your animations. If your animators gave you an updated FBX with new moves then you have a hierarchy within your game object means bones. otherwise no animations could be played. I guess you would need to set up a new rigg with the exact same hierarchy and convention naming to add new animations. Your request is weird and not really clear though.
Sorry i tried my hardest to make it clear lol… Do you know someone who does rigging work Rosor who is available? I guess i just need a new rig, not bones i misspoke.
also all the bones have to be exactly the same length and in the exact same position to transfer the animations over perfectly correct?
In our experience you would be much better off just having the original animations redone rather than trying to get them to work with the new rig. It’s going to be a nightmare and instead of spending a few extra hours on new animations you’ll spend 10 trying to get the stupid things to work and even then I can almost guarantee you’ll run into problems… Lord we’ve been there too many times before to ever make that mistake again. When in doubt, redo from scratch instead of trying to get the square peg to fit in the round hole. Every time we’ve tried the amount of work ends up being double that of just redoing it from the beginning
false, if there are already a rigg in the T pose as FBX there are tools and plugins to create the exact same rigg almost automatically. Here I’m talking about a 3DS max script that works pretty well. if the character is a human then it can create from the hierarchy a whole biped to be animated in character studio ( takes a few minute but need to know what has to be done). here having the same re created rigg would allow you to keep your old anims and create new ones. I fell in that issue when by mistake I deleted a native 3Ds max file and i only had left the fbx with animation.
@Adrenaline Crew : bones are part of the rigg, so if you need a rigg you need bones. here if you have an fbx with animations then you have a rigg in your file.
One thing that could be throwing you off: I’ve seen a case with the FBX format where it converts a Max Biped not into bone objects exactly, but into dummy objects that are used as bones. The dummy objects seem to work and the character animates, but if you’re filtering for strictly bone objects (i.e. hiding helper/dummy objects), you might not see the rig made up of dummy objects and think there’s no rig. In that one case my client was asking for the bone count to be reduced and the vertex weighting to be made more efficient, so I just re-did it with a fresh Biped. Not too time-consuming if you’ve got a working animation to start from. But of course a tool that does this more automatically would be even better.
true when you import an fbx with bones in 3Ds max for example sometimes you have the rigg recognized as dummies. Maybe you got confused by that.
but you cant use those bones if they arent in their bind pose…which is the t pose that the model starts at…everything has to be zeroed out… correct?
5 animators and riggers can NOT figure out how to use my old animations on a new rig but yet the last 3 people did…
How is this done, why is this so hard ?
If yer using Unity 4 it an’t that hard.
-Randy
Can I put the original FBX file and the new FBX file in the same prefab, then how would i call on the new animations over the old ones?
If you use Unity4 the Mecanim system will place all the animations in a controller and retarget them for the character the controller is dropped on.
HTH
Randy