Character Animation Mixamo Time Editor & Human IK to Animate in Maya

to review how to get your character in here go under characters and upload a character drag your character to the drop zone click on next line up the rings with the appropriate area on your character inspect it to make sure everything's okay and then you can select the type of skeleton you want i'm going to create the standard skeleton with 65 bones and then click next when it's all done calculating here's your character you can spin it around by left dragging in the view click on next and click on next again when you're first starting out your character is in a t pose and this is a good pose we'll need it a little later on let's download the character in the t pose position and if you made a mistake and you skipped past that take five and you skipped that step go to animations and look for t-pose you would click to apply that motion to the character and then click on download and you don't need it with the skin we already downloaded that but if you haven't downloaded the skin like in the previous step you would use with skin now right now we just need without skin just to get the t-pose find one or two motions like a walk but not a walking circle just a regular walking it's important to use in place so please click this button whether you're doing animation maya or you're doing a video game in place is the right type to select then download this first motion without skin and click on download pick another motion i'm going to pick an idle motion that's where someone's just hanging around whether they're ready to box or just taking in the sights of this vast empty 3d space pick a good idol click on download without skin now we're ready to put all this together including baking keys and using the control rig to do some animation with these pre-canned animations in my it's very important to set a project because when you create all these animation clips it needs to be stored somewhere where it can be accessed over and over again go under file project window let's make a new one calling it larry a adventure to store this project and you can browse your hard drive for a different location click on accept close that window and go under file set project make sure it's pointing to that new folder you just created you don't have to double click just select the outside of that folder and click on set i'm going to save this scene and when i save the scene you can see that it's pointing within that set folder i'm going to assemble the scene based upon the clips i downloaded this is the t pose clip and the rest of the clips will animate the character now it's your choice whether do the association with the humanik now or later if you do it later then use the t-pose clip to put the character back into the t-pose and then associate it with the human ik to associate with the human ik click on create character definition going under shading and x-ray joints i can see the joints in here to associate with the human eye case so later on after i animate the clip using the time editor i could come back and use a control rig to do those final touches of animation select the bone right click on the bone here assign select the bone and do that for all the bones it's mirrored so you only have to do half the body selecting the wrist right click assign bone get to the fingers click this triangle right here select the joint for the finger right click assign and continue that until everything is defined going from finger to finger joint to joint next finger if it's a little tricky to select just maneuver your viewport get a better angle done with the hand click this triangle to see the full body pick a leg a sign here's the foot go open up the foot triangle just to see if there's any other parts maybe i'll select this and i'll sign it to here and here clicking the triangle from hip to hip first joint on the spine clicking the triangle this will be the first joint on the inside of the spine so spine one i'll select this as spine number two here's the head let me i'm going to click on this joint click on this triangle for the neck assign back to the head clicking on the head bone right there assign i think i'm going to change this up a little bit what to do if you're assigned and you want to change things click on this bone right click a sign selected it's going to ask a few questions just say okay sure resign it i'm gonna unassign this bone right click clear and i'll leave that bone alone before i finish i can see i have to do the same thing to the right foot right here since i've moved around bones on that side all this means go here and clear that bone right click clear as long as everything's green you're all done now you could go under source and select control rig wait a moment and here's a control rig for our character i'll use this to move around our character a little later okay explore it for a moment this will move the character around here i'm hitting undo and i'm going back to source none next step is to apply clips in the time editor and then to bake them back down to the skeleton so we can come back and use the control rig go to windows animation editors time editor i want to add this character and a t post to the track i could click this one or this one since this is the only character in the scene and its namespace was derived when it was uploaded and rigged i can just take a clip like walking and drag it into this location zoom out and move this time playback head and there's my walking i can repeat the walking by using this icon click on it and that will repeat the motion clip to zoom out just use whatever you use normally to zoom out wheelie mouse or option right mouse button i'm going to extend the timeline here when you see the double arrows just click and drag and that extends the timeline i have two walk cycles now i want it to go into the idle pose drag the idle here click on the idle and drag it to the upper track and just bump it into it this crates this moment of transition from walking going to idle this is the loop and this is the trim i'm going to select this clip and apply trim to it i don't need any extra idle moments after this point because my character is going to do an action using the control rig looping trimming rescaling time i'm selecting these clips both of them right click and we can bake it to a new clip bake it to the scene applying it these keys to the scene or big to scene and delete bake it to the scene and delete from here first i'm going to just bake it to a new clip and that new clip combines all the animations i'm deleting the previous one combines the two animations of walking and now idle that stops i'm going to save this case i want to come back at some other point right click on it export selected and it's going to be placed within my time editor clips i'm going to call this walk idle if i ever need to reapply this to my character i can just get my character into the t pose and reapply this clip in the time editor that's why i saved it i'm gonna bake this motion to my character because i want to actually animate my character using a control rig select the clip right click bake and select bake to scene i'm going to select bake to scene and delete this because i'm done with the time editor now if i just scrub my timeline you can see that this character still moves if i click on a bone that bone has all the keys on it now that i baked it to the scene let me pick five my goal was take five my goal is to make my character move forward the move forward part you could create a box instead of a box you could create a ring such as a nurb circle create nerves primitives circle and that's going to be my controller if i want to add a little ux to this circle i'll go to the edit points select this first edit point just drag it forward point in the direction where the character faces forward select the hip from my rig shift click on this ring and press the p key now wherever this circle goes so will my character let me make it move forward selecting the circle s key where does it stop around here s key you can adjust the spacing there's my character walking forward let me put an object in the scene character walks takes a moment and then points well how can we get it to point right now we're back into regular timeline animation if you wanted you could start to rotate to make a pointing gesture an easier way since this character was defined under human ik all you have to do is go under source control rig oh but we lost all that motion gee what can we do about that no problem let me go back to none and here's our character still moving going here under this big button and selecting bake not bake skeleton but bake to control rig we'll take all the key info apply to the skeleton and place it on the control rig so big button bake two control rig this places the character and control rig mode source now my character still knows how to move forward and all i have to do is select let's say this okay select all these keys going this way right click and delete and now my character will point at this object let's say by frame 240. with the move tool selected picking up this control rig and getting it to point that way not much of a point yet maybe he's reaching out to just grab that object scale bigger place it under here and we can make the character look at this object starting where you want it to look maybe around here selecting the controller select those key frames out here in the timeline and delete those not needed delete and let's say by frame 220 character takes a little interest in here s key so walks hey what's this a cone let me touch the cone continue your animation that way now if you want to get all this back into a motion clip you would go under here go to bake and bake to skeleton this bakes all the information from the control rig back to the skeleton you go to windows animation editor time editor and this will complete loop selecting my character clicking this first icon and now the extended animation including this action grab top of cone and stair addicts are back as an animation clip in the time editor and you can work back and forth following the same process baking the animation back down to the skeleton baking that animation to the control rig and adding additional animation take five and following these steps to add additional animation through this animation workflow remember what's moving the character forward through the scene is this ring you want your character to be in place just delete that last key or your character has to take a slight detour say there was a box in the way don't want that box to get in your way the character can then rotate around rotate and move this controller around now our character knows how to detour around that box big step since there's so few keys that describe this motion going around an obstacle course anytime you could just delete it and you're not affecting the animation of the motion of the character

Channel: Clayrain Digi Fun

Views: 9,346

Keywords: Character Animation, Time Editor, Maya, Blender Characters, Rigging, Motion Clips, Human IK

Id: 1y87M5t8IUg

Length: 18min 30sec (1110 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 07 2021