Recommended Software for rigging

Unity Engine
1

Hi Everyone,

I started on Unity this week and I’ve been running through the Unity training courses online it would seem i’m a bit stuck on a couple of points that are probably very straight forward but I can’t seem to get my head around them.

I’ve been using blender and been rigging characters just fine, i’ve got no problems turning them into 1st/3rd person controllable characters etc, i’ve even wired up my Kinnect and managed to do some motion capture!

  1. Is there a way to easily edit the models/animations from the asset store in blender, if not what should I be using?

  2. In terms of creating new animations what would you recommend, I could just carry on with motion capture and tidying it up but I was wondering if there was an easier way?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions

Marc

2

I understand that Blender has limited support for importing fbx files. Before you buy something from the asset store to animate, you may want to try importing a free model to test out the workflow.

3

Yeah i’m having major problems with Blender and asset store stuff, what I was trying to figure out mainly is how I can use blender to add additional animations to the standard ones, but just getting most of the models into blender is tough!

4

As an alternative to Blender, you could use Mixamo’s Auto-Rigger.

5

marc you might want to look at Cinema Mo Cap - a Unity extension that allows recording of animations directly in Unity using a Kinect.

Cinema Suite

According to their Facebook page - a new release (V1.1) is due out very soon that will allow the animations created with it to be edited in Blender.

cheers, gryff :slight_smile:

6

Hi Guys thanks for the suggestions, Cinema Mo Cap looks awesome i’ll give it a punt but i’m still going to need to edit the FBX files that come from the asset store, lets say I did a pose that required the fingers to be repositioned I couldn’t do that with kinect so i’d need to still import that FBX, textures etc into something. I’ve actually just grabbed 3d Studio Max but for some reason you still can’t actually import the whole thing with rigging, textures and animations!?!?

7

hi Guys,

We are submitting v1.1 to the Asset Store tomorrow. They are usually pretty quick for review, so in a couple days the new version will be available. We have a blender tutorial coming soon, and we also tested exporting FBX from blender back into Unity after modifying Cinema Mo Cap models, and it works great. Thanks for checking us out!

8

Bah, nevermind… I tried the FBX Converter… exported an FBX from Blender, converted to Binary with the converter, then re-imported into Blender but it lost the textures.

9

If you’re on a Mac, you might try Cheetah 3D; it can import FBX files with animations (and export back out) just fine, with one caveat: all the separate animations in the FBX file load into Cheetah as one big “take” (animation).

I’m still looking for a good solution to this problem.

10

Actually adding animations to Asset Store characters is really easy if you’ve got 3d Studio Max, you just add a biped skeleton to your scene, animate, export to fbx, import to unity and chuck it into mecanim, havent tried it with blender but I can’t see it being much different. Right i’m off to buy another kinect.

11

Yes, the procedure Marc described works well with Cheetah, too. But that’s about creating a new animation — I thought the OP was asking about tweaking existing animations.

I’m still pretty much a noob at this stuff myself, and it seems I misspoke before, so I want to try to clear that up.

Cheetah3D does load all takes in an FBX file into separate takes within C3D, and writes them out as separate takes too (which Unity sees as separate animation clips). The problem is other modeling apps — it appears that the vast majority of them don’t support more than one take per file. So either they write out each clip as a separate file (usually with a complete copy of the mesh in each one), or they write all animations out as one giant take, and then carve this up into separate clips within Unity.

When you get a model from the Asset Store, it will often have many choices. As an example, I recently bought the Dragon model from 3dfoin. It comes with iClone, Blender, FBX/MAX, DrEse, OGRE, RC, and a Unity package. Some of these, like the DrEse (whatever that is) folder, contain a bunch of FBX files — one for each animation. Others, like the FBX/MAX folder, contains a single file that contains all the animations in one giant take, plus a text file that tells you which range of frame numbers correspond to which animations (stand is from 0-40, idle is from 42-342, etc.).

The Unity package contains the same single FBX file, plus the textures and materials and such all set up for use in Unity. It also has the animation clips already defined on the model. But these animation clip definitions do not appear to be actually stored in the FBX file itself — they’re part of the Unity import data, and appear to be stored in the .meta file that’s created next to the FBX.

That’s why, when you load this FBX file into Cheetah3D (or any other modeling app), it doesn’t see the clips as different takes — they’re not different takes, and there’s nothing your modeling app can do about it. So you either have to tweak the animations in one giant clip, or load one animation at a time from of those formats where each animation is in its own FBX file. Either one is a reasonable solution, I suppose, though neither is as nice as having all the clips available as separate takes in one file (which you can do if all your rigging and animation are done in Cheetah from the get-go).

Hope this clears things up, and sorry for creating confusion earlier today!

  • Joe
12

Hi Joe,

Thats interesting so is it actually possible to get a complete FBX into the program of choice by importing the meta data or is it in unit format? I’m still interested in what you have to say, I was talking about adding animations to existing models which i’ve sorted but it makes sense to know how to adjust them too

13

You can get the complete FBX; the issue is that the FBX, as generated by most modeling apps, doesn’t have all the information about the clips. Typically the FBX contains just one giant animation, and the divisions of that into clips is stored in the Unity metadata (which no modeling app can read, as far as I know).

It doesn’t have to be that way — FBX is rich enough to store information about multiple clips (or “takes” as they’re called in Cheetah3D). You can see this by creating a multi-take animation in C3D, exporting to FBX, and notice that the clips are already set up. And if you reload that FBX into C3D, all the separate takes are still there.

But apparently the ability to do this is fairly unique to C3D; other modeling apps apparently either store all the animations in one giant take, as already described, or write out a separate FBX file for each animation.

None of this is a show-stopper, though. Unity makes it easy to mix match animations, regardless of what files they come from. So, for example, you could open up whatever FBX of the model you have, throw out whatever animations are in it, set up your new animation (or several such), save this out as a new file, and load animations from that file into Unity. Then you can apply those animations to the original model. As long as the rigging is the same (and under Mecanim, even that is not strictly required), the animations will match up just fine.

14

Make sure that this is the case. I’ve often had the materials seem to be lost, but it’s just the paths to the textures themselves that get blanked out; the references and UV maps should still exist (assuming the FBX plugin for the package you’re using supports it – unofficial ones may not have this full functionality), as the FBX format does retain all of those. HOWEVER, as long as the version of the character that you’re using as the Avatar/BAse Model has the textures, you should be fine AFAIK – the animation files shouldn’t need texture data since that (and the geometry deifnition, actually) should live within the base model.

Yeah, other than MotionBuilder (formerly FilmBox, for which FBX was names/developed) and Softimage/XSI, no other animation package seems to be set up to have multiple takes within a single frame, mainly because of legacy coding and setting up for this sort of thing for non-linear editing would be a right pain in the ass to shoehorn into their architectures.

As far as the original question goes, your best bet for getting exact data in and doing the animation editing on are going to be Autodesk products like Maya and 3DSMax. MotionBuilder would be a second, mainly because it is a program that exists solely to do motion editing and rendering; you can add nulls and controllers, but there’s no way to create new skeletons or append old ones, as you cannot create bones or weighting in MoBu.

XSI and Lightwave would be next in line, as the FBX plugin still seems to be nicely robust for both packages, but I haven’t worked in either in about four years, so I dunno what shape they’re in as far as for the newer versions of the FBX format (2012-2014)

For other packages (Blender, c3d, Rhino3d/Bongo, etc) you’re going to have to dig to make sure the FBX support for them is robust enough to handle what you need.