Human Rig for Maya

Hey all. I've been working on a simple rig to use for animation.



I used the default agent skeleton with some modifications. It still has the weapon bones that it came with, but I can swap it out once we have our weapon design down. I still need to rig the hands and set up an IK system for the head. When finished, the rig can be used for all characters that used the agent template. Next, I hope to try skinning and maybe do some test animations to export into CryEngine.

Cool.
Before doing any complex animations test it out in-game. Not that there's some problem and all of the animations have to be redone.
I'll write up a list of animations we need soon. Keep it up, you're important!

Rigging a character in the A-Pose was harder than I thought but I managed to get it done. I had to rebuild the arm and spine because of bad joint orients. I did a quick skin of the default agent model and posed it. The rig seems to work well and I'll be able to animate with it now.

Keep up the good work .

Why can't we use the CeyEngine default rig and put our anims on it? It's pretty good.

Because there's no default rig, only a default skeleton.
A rig are only the controls (colored boxes and icons in his screenshot) which move the skeleton. The rig won't actually end up ingame, only the skeleton.

Good work BTW! Do you maybe know how well rigs transfer to other apps with .fbx? I assume it won't really work but it might be worth a try. Then the Max/Softimage people could use yur rig, too.

Whoops, my bad, I missed the rest of the post. You're using trhe default skeletona nd baseing your rig on that. Forgive me, animation aint my strong point.
Keep up the good work

@Schlechtwetterfront I tried exporting with FBX but the constraints on the rig didn't seem to carry over to 3DS and the skeleton disappears in Softimage. I'll try to work it out a bit more.

@sceluk No problem dude.

It's not really a problem. Did you try to export an animation already?

Slowly figuring it out. Gonna try using MayaCE3 to export it.

The good news is that I figured out how to export the skinned skeleton and custom animations into sandbox. The bad news is that the character sinks into the ground whenever the animation plays.

Spoiler:

 

I'll figure it out eventually. Once it works out, I can start skinning our trooper models and finally start animating.

Maybe post a thread on the crydev forums. Maybe they'll solve it as you experiment with it.
Good work BTW! I'm looking forward to some animations!
A quick list of animations we need:
- Third person upperbody pistol animations. You can use one of the pistols Deforges uploaded to the dropbox (3D folder). I dunno if they have the right size though.
- Prone animations. (not that important, we can do with only stand and crouch right now).
- Different third person reload animations for all/most weapons (not that important either).

- First person animations for every weapon. (these are rather important but I think we will have another animator soon, so then he can do the FP animations and you do the TP animations).

Maybe the sinking into the ground has to do with the toe and heel nub bones?

I got it working now. The problem was I mislabeled the locomotion locator of the skeleton. It's all above ground now.

Since this skeleton is set up differently than the default skeleton, the default animations are probably not usable. If that's the case, I'll need to work on placeholder anims for basic movement next.

Cool!
I suppose you know what sort of basic animations are needed so I won't write that down.

I dunno how exactly CE works with animations, but if you named the bones the same I think it should work.
It's not that important though if you're good and fast. We can use the default skeleton for development for now and when you have the basic movement done we can switch over to your skeleton. It's not like we have loads of characters to re-skin yet.

Nice work Terach, keep it going! :-)

For movement controls, are we basing ours off of the one in Battlefront II? If there's a control scheme in mind, it would help me a lot with planning.

What do you mean exactly?
Basically it's like every shooter methinks.
8 directions for movement (W+A, W, W+D, D, D+S, S, S+A, A).
Jumping in all directions.
IMO no rolling (that always looked weird).
Movement types:
- Running/sprint only forward (maybe forward-right and forward-left, too?)
- Walking (like in SWBF games, a bit faster than normal walking but no running) in all directions.
- Crouching.
- Prone.

The trooper will 'linearly' follow the camera, so you cant look at him from the front. That means no fancy turning animations either.

Yeah, I was wondering about the rolling/walking since it's not that common in modern shooters but was in SWBF. I'll be putting up a to-do list in another topic.

Quote :

IMO no rolling (that always looked weird).

We should add rolling, but we have to make sure it drains loads of energy so people won't spam it.

rocknroll237 wrote:

Quote :

IMO no rolling (that always looked weird).

We should add rolling, but we have to make sure it drains loads of energy so people won't spam it.

Well, yes, that is a discussion related to the gameplay. I agree in general that it should take quite a bit of energy. Plus some classes can't.

I have managed to get a Maya character + animation in the editor, then imported the skeleton from Maya into Max and exported an animation which worked properly in the editor alongside the Maya animation. I didn't make a rig for it in Max, but I can easily strap the bones to a Max Biped and just do an animation bake (ala UT3 with ActorX). So in short, Maya & Max can be used for animation using the same skeleton with no issues.

When the skeleton is finalised, let me know and I'll get to work on making a Max counterpart.

Interesting thing I found out:

The SDK Maya character skeleton won't work 'as-is' with the ingame animations, but the SDK Max character rig does. This is due to the Maya rigs bone axis not matching up with what is in the editor. Someone with intimate knowledge of Maya could fix this.