Use same animation on different Characters??

[Lorigosolo]

Hi All!!

Can i reuse an animation??

I have to animate 8 characters ( 2 humans, 2 Elfs, 2 hobbits, 2 dawrfs) for a game, but the thing is that the 8 characters should have the same animations. So i thought that i could ring the human, save the animations with motion mixer and then reuse them on the other characters. Unfortunally i couldn´t do that because the dwarf is half the size of the human, and when i load the animation it doesn´t work :(

Any idea how can i reuse animations on diferent characters that have different size??

Please tell me that there is a way to do that or i will be toasted!! :p

Thanks
Lorigosolo

[Dodgy]

If you can parent your rig to a null then scale that to the size you want, that might work....For your dwarf you might have to use the 'Use bones from' and put Null to make it work though I haven't really tried that. If you've baked the animation into just the rotations of the bones, they should work....LOL This is all speculation on my part :)

[Lorigosolo]

I have parented my ring to a null and scale it, but when i activate the bones the mesh suffer the scaling of the bones, who knows why!!

'Use bones from' and put Null to make it work though I haven't really tried that. If you've baked the animation into just the rotations of the bones, they should work

Lol, where is the "use bones from" tool?? And to bake the rotations i have to use the md_Scan, right?? I´m a newbie on animation, i only know how to ring a character with Fk/IK, the fancy tools i haven´t learn to use yet :o

Thanks For the help Dodgy!!

Lorigosolo

[dobermunk]

Just go into 'setup' mode and -

doh! Sorry, I use messiah.

[Lorigosolo]

Lol!!

I guess that with messiah this would be the easiest thing to do righ?? :P
Unfortunally i don´t have it, Darn!!:(

The "use bones from" isn´t a native tool from Layout??

Lorigosolo

[dobermunk]

Sorry. Usually restrain from posts that aren't really helpful, but...

Yeah. This is the reason I started using messiah back when it was a plug-in. Need to change your model? No problem.
Notice strange deformation in the middle of animating? Go into set-up mode without worrying that something somewhere will punish you for it.

It's for animation what endomorphs are for modeling blend shapes. I'll stop now, though ;-)

[Dodgy]

Select the object, and go into bone selection mode, then bring up the properties panel. 'Use bones from' is right at the top!

[Lorigosolo]

Dodgy: So, i should first resize the human rig to the dwarf size, then bring the dwarf into the scene and use the bones from the human object, right??

Dobermunk: I saw some videos from messiah website, and it looks like a really impresive program, i liked a lot the autoring and melt tools. OOhh the rigs always punishes me for little errors, and i always find out the problems after having animated 3 or 5 sequences. :o And then i have to fix the rig, and do the animations sequences again. I hate that !! :mad:
Well, i will have to be patience and learn to rig properly with Lightwave native tools!! :p

Cya
Lorigosolo

[Dodgy]

Okay okay, forget all I said :) This is how you do it :)

Set up an actor for the main character as normal, but Lock out all position or size channels in it (these will distort your dwarf character) Use only rotation channels (go into the Actor map panel in motion mixer and turn all the pos and scale channels to [L]). Bones should all have unique names.


Animate the character as normal, baking any ik to the rotation channels of your character. Make a motion from this animation. Use 'Save motion' in the Motion menu in Motion mixer's panel.

Copy the skelegons from your man model into your dwarf and size them to the right scale. Send it to layout, and convert them to bones. Basically this is to get the same skeleton with the same bone names into the dwarf, at the right size.

Create an actor from the dwarf bones, as normal. You shouldn't have to go through it's channels and Lock out the position stuff as these will be locked out from the saved motion anyway.

Use 'Load motion' in the Motion menu and select your previously saved motion. Motion mixer will try to remap the bones from the man to the same named bones in the dwarf. For this reason, the bones should all have unique names.

Add the motion to the track, and the dwarf should animate... Hopefully looking quite good, though it might need some tweaking..

[dbolto]

It's cool looking @ the multiple ways that you can skin a cat w/ LW.

I encountered a job like this last week and needed to do the same thing. What I did was I needed to copy the motion from one character to seven others.

I went to the scene tab in Layout / Generics / and to the Keyframer plugin.

This is the best thing since popcorn.

It allowed me to transfer motions from one object to another in no time.

(only down side is that you have to transfer the motions for each element that you want.)

Just wanted to add my 2 cents

dbolto

www.dbolto.com

[Lorigosolo]

Thanks Guys for taking some of your valuable time to explain your methods!!! I will try the 2 ways, and I will let you know if it worked!!!

Cya
Lorigosolo