Transferring rigs from one file to another

[ggoblin]

I can across a very interesting video by Mitch on another approach to reusability.. this time not in the modelling stage but in the animation stage.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iI5EBrgStE8

He seems to have created a library of bone poses/animations which work across different characters.. (I'm guessing they all have the same skeleton structure?)

[Greenlaw]

Yes, that's how it generally works: you need the same 'core' skeleton structure in each character for the data to transfer properly.

It's the same principle when working with mocap data for 3D rigs: you use a standardized skeleton with a specific hierarchy and naming convention so you can retarget motions from one rig to another. The skeletons can have different body proportions and they can included additional bones (like tails and wings) rig but the skeletons MUST have the same core structure to be able to share motion data. This system also works between different 3D programs. For example, I used to move motion data from iPi Mocap Studio (for capture) to Motion Builder (editing/retargeting) to LightWave (final anim, lighting and rendering,) and sometimes to Maya (rigging and weight painting.) Nowadays my route is to go from iPi Mocap Studio to iClone Pipeline (editing/retargeting) to LightWave. I'm currently working on getting data from iPi Mocap Studio to characters in Blender (final anim and rendering).

My hope is that Moho will adopt some of the rig-editing features I'm familiar with from 3D rigging and animation, especially when it comes to reformatting the same skeleton for different characters. Not so much for using mocap data but definitely for exchanging body parts and maybe motion data between characters.

(TBH, I almost never reuse motion data in Moho. In fact the only time I can recall doing so was for the running cats I described earlier.)

[chucky]

What I'm suggesting would not have you go to a different layer to animate.... that's the whole point.

Intriguing. How would you do that?

Would it entail setting up lots of smart bones in both the main bone layer and the nested bone layer (as per the discussion in the other thread? https://lostmarble.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=34924 ) or is there another way to control for example point transform animation in a nested bone layer from the main bone layer?

No , it can't be sone now, It would have to be a new feature to nest bone layers with control at the top.

[synthsin75]

Technically, you can have all your control bones in the main bone layer and just use bone layer references for all your nested bone layers. The trick is to not have your nested bone layers inside the main bone layer, but have the main bone layer as the top sibling in a group.

[Greenlaw]

That seems to be the sensible approach that works well with Moho - reuse a rig by making a copy of it and then building on it the new features that you require.

This is different to a modular approach where you plugin rigs (import) into a new rig when that functionality is required.

The cat example is just one basic example...it was unnecessary to break out body parts in this case, only re-importing the character to a project to change the Style IDs.

However, as explained earlier in this topic it's possible to share parts with other rigs if you observe certain rules. (i.e., the hand sub-rig that was re-used for many of the Boss Baby characters.) Then you can transfer the parts to other characters as described.

You just want to avoid using 13.0 for this; it only works with 12.5 and earlier, and 13.5.x.

[chucky]

Technically, you can have all your control bones in the main bone layer and just use bone layer references for all your nested bone layers. The trick is to not have your nested bone layers inside the main bone layer, but have the main bone layer as the top sibling in a group.

That's pretty interesting.
I think though, the purpose of nesting bone layers is to easily append rigs with assets which include bones and their dependent layers.
The convenience of modularity really.

[x-vishon]

It would be great to consolidate controls and bones on a controls layer so you could make modular parts. But also just being able to merge bone layers without breaking their associations would be good.
That way if you have a few different parts that make a character or some basic parts templated out you could import the Vector Art and Bones / Smart Bones into the project and once everything is in just merge bones and have all the parts combine.
Just made a hand rig yesterday and if I could have just done one finger and replicated it a bunch of times merged the whole Bone structure and smart bones into a hand layer and eventually that into the character that would be nice. I did see that multrush is working on a script that handles things similarly. Baffled why this limitation still exists for copying and pasting or combining parts in a simple stream lined way. This has been somthing I have wanted for a while but SM did nothing to address. Hoping that this is addressed in a official build perhaps in 14.