- Home /
How to deal with joints that are child's of controls when exporting from Maya ect
Hi all I just joined this group because I'm involved in an pro bono indie game development group just to get some practice of game development and I'm their designated animator, rigger. First of all I have to state that I'm not a professional rigger at all. Just to get that out of the way. Now I'm not sure that the rig that I made for our game is going to work in Unity. So I was wondering if someone here could help me out. The problem I'm having is that I had no prior experience with Unity and therefore wasn't aware of any rigging limitations regarding Unity. My main concern is how to get my animation out of Maya into Unity. I know that I'm supposed to bake down the keys to the joints and then delete all the controls. And after that I should delete all controls, then export as FBX. But if I do that some of my joints gets deleted as well for instance my revers lock foot joints. Now it gets a bit technical. I don't remember where I picked up this idea but I think it might have been in some DT tutorial on rigging. My collar joint is orient constrained to a locator called locOri_r_shld01 for the right side and vice versa for the left, that's a child of the collar control. The shoulder joint is point constrained to the collar joint. As i said I don't remember why I did this setup, but I think it was recommended to do so in some tutorial as a way to get better control of your rig. But now I'm finding out that to be able to use the humanoid character controller in Unity, every joint needs to be a child of the one before it in the chain. Like Shoulder needs to be a child of Collar and so on. It doesn't look like I can have the rig setup the way I have it now, is that a correct assumption? And here is where the trouble start. Should I alter the rig or can I use the generic controller instead in Unity to be able to facilitate the Mecanim state machine. I don't even know whether to first export only the character to Unity and then the animations as separate files or is it better to export all in one fell swoop, AKA character and all the animations in one file? Sorry for such a lengthy first post. But I'm really lost here, I would love to get in touch with someone with extensive knowledge of this, so that I can talk to he or she over Skype. I just think that I'm in well over my head on this one. Cheers Eddie