Mixamo animations to Custom character in Maya

all right this is a video on how to download mix mo characters import the animations and tamiya and then attach them to a custom character inside of Maya the first thing you're gonna need to do is go ahead and go to mix mo and go ahead and log in here okay something to cover real quick is the character you select does play a big role as far as importing it into Maya and the main reason is the bone structure so if you'll click this little skeleton here because you go from the mesh to the skeleton view and if you go through several of these you'll see like this guy here he has a center bone here whereas if you pick someone like this guy see he has three bones for his right hand and his left hand so it's important to pick a character that closely resembles your bone structure for your custom character in this case I'm going to stick to the X pot that character seems to do pretty good as far as importing I have a female character so that's why I chose the X Box instead of like the Y bot but I believe that these skeletons are identical okay so it's important that when you export your character to use this method for this workflow that you use the same character every time you download a new animation to keep the bone names the same and to keep the same skeletal structure alright the next thing you have to do is you have to download the characters as a tee pose so you just come over here and do a search hit enter and load up the tee pose at this point you can show the mesh - you don't have to show the skeleton I was just shown the skeleton to point out the difference between the bone structures so I'm gonna select T pose and I'm going to go ahead and download this we want it as FBX doesn't really matter with or without skin it does matter your frames per second now for this it's not going to matter because you're just downloading the T pose but in the future for animations no matter what you want to which one you want to select if you're doing like video video animation you probably want 24 I think most liked video animations and 24 frames per second I'm going to be doing games and most games run at 60 frames per second so I'm gonna select the 60 frames and keyframe reduction I'm gonna leave that to month so I'm gonna go ahead and download this now so I've got a dumb motor so I'm just gonna start the download alright but before we leave here I'm going to download a secondary animation something that is pretty obvious let's see what about this run to dive all right so I'm gonna also download this run to dive at this point once you have the T pose you would just download any other animations that you could possibly want you can also use the adjustments as you see fit so I'm gonna go ahead and just download this animation just so I can have an animation to show you guys so I'm just go download again FBX 60 frames per second make sure your settings are the same and then click download and then go ahead and just start that download all right so I'm gonna minimize this and I'm gonna open up Maya so just get a click maiya here I'll wait for it to load all right so Mia finally opened up then loaded here so the first thing you're going to need to do every animation that you want to transfer to your character you're going to need to first load in your tipos character character from mix them out as a tee pose so I'm going to do that now file import all right so here is some of them out here some of my animations so I'm going to load in the tee pose here all the settings are default for this or I think it might have changed to one of these settings here but I'll go through I'll just scroll through the settings so you see what I have we'll talk about some of these settings in a minute here but for now we're just gonna load in our T pose okay now what we're going to do is if you click this little bone button here and the the top there you'd be able to see the bones now one of the problems the problem they're going to run into is that in order to transfer animations to another character you need the animated character to have a control rig okay it's not that hard to set up a control rig you would go to create control rig define and if this is your first character that you're doing this with you're gonna need to do this anyways for your first time you get on make sure not to be an object mode and I'm going to turn off master selection here and I'm just gonna quickly go through this so you got your shoulder shoulder bone arm bone and bone now you're probably going to want to go through and actually click on a little arrow here and actually do all the bones and I will do that to actually have this done already all the hand bones here so I'm just gonna do this real quick I'm not to do the hands just I can show you kind of what you need to do to get going here so here's the hip there's the first joint in the spine obviously you should fill out all this points spines if you can do the head bone do the legs thigh foot bone now my character that I'm going to be transporting the animation to does have this reference node this character does not it's not an issue you can still use a skeleton that doesn't have a center bone and transfer it to one that does so as of right now that's all the bones that we have to have your little arrows your little icon to be green in here again you're going to want to go into the spine particularly and the hand and make sure you set up all these bones also so I'm going to do that now and then I'll pause the video alright I'm just doing a quick thing here just in case you're not quite sure how to do the hand for some reason I'm just gonna show quick video so it's just like the body it's just that you have to go through and line up these bones here so it's actually fairly quick but this is enough of a pain that you won't don't want to do have to do this for every animation so I'm going to show you how you can do this how you can set this up without having to do every single animation to do this for every single animation you import also if you have a toe bone like here I have a bone at the ankle and the toe you'll want to select in the foot whoops you'll want to select this bone for the feet and if you hold your mouse over it it says left toe base so that's actually going to be the control for your toes even though it's kind of at the ankle it's a little confusing so it's not the same bone as the left foot here all right so once you do this hopefully you'll never have to do this again what you're gonna do is you're gonna actually save this you go to this little Save button up here and I would actually mean this the name of your character so in this case it's Y bot so I just saved this as Y bot but I already have a template saved and leave everything else the same I recommend is leaving it in the path that they specify and just hit OK I'm gonna hit cancel because I already had this dim-lit all right once you've got the template created basically what you'll want to do every time you import a new animation the process of when you saw each animation that you import this is what you have to do very little file new scene don't save first I'm going to show you an issue that arises two things the reason why we created so I'm gonna go pull in my actual character that I want to animate from the mix Simoes animations and I pull it in as a reference because I have a base model that they then create animations and separate FB X's so I always pull in my character that I actually want to transfer the animation to as a reference all right so I'm gonna bring in my base model all right now you probably want to change this to 60 frames per second if you chose 60 frames per second in the mix mo selections and for whatever reason for me it always changes us a 2.50 I always set it to zero I don't know why it does that anyways it's not that you'll really matter once we import the animations but just be aware that if you from 24 seconds frames per second to 60 frames per second led to changes to zero all right so now I've got the character now this character already has a control rig and your character that you actually want to animate should already have a control rig all right so now what we're gonna do is we're gonna leave this character in place and what you have to do first is I'm gonna first show you what happens if you just try and import the animation first without doing the necessary steps and then I'll show you the correct way to do it so I'll show you the issues you're gonna run into and the correct way to do it so I'm just go ahead and file import the FBX files that we downloaded all right here's the XPS XPS files that we imported so I'm going to import run to dive all right now every tutorial that you find tells you Oh what you have to do is you have to go to your character the g8f is my character that i want to animate and then you have to go down here to the source and select the control rig of the actual animation but what you'll find out is that the mix mo animation that we just imported doesn't have a control rig so there's nothing for us to select in the source for the character so what you would normally do or what you would probably one of the first things that you come to as a conclusion is you go to none and create a control rig and you do define and then you'd have to do this whole process over that where you select the head you select the arm and all this to put a control rig on your animation so that you could transfer it to your actual character but because we already created a template stead of having to do this manually now we can just go to file open here oh we have to actually have the mix and little character root bones like that so here's mix mo rig then we go to open and actually let me take a step to show everyone what I actually just did so I'm gonna trash this one alright so what I did here is the g8f is the only character that actually has a control rig or an H I K rig so what I did is I went to none and I want to create character def or sorry create control rig but we have to have the actual mix of all character selected and we have to go to define not create if you click create I'll just create a random control rig and they'll be in the t-post but since everything is already mapped out for us all the weights and everything for the skin already there we don't need to create a new control rig we just need to define a control rig from what we already have alright so now at this point you would have to go through and do all of your connecting so that you had a control rig on your mix mo character that would allow you to transfer the animation to your character so since we already created that template what we can do now is instead of how to manually select everything we can select our mixer mode character then go to open and you'll see you'll have that template here they can select from so in my case my bot and I have I can just select my bot and they'll automatically you'll see it automatically mapped the bones now you're gonna see that there's an issue it comes up with some of the z-axis and rotation seems to be off to be honest I don't know enough about Maya to know exactly why these issues occur though I do know it has something to do with mapping the hands so if you don't have the hands and app and you just have the shoulder map and the forearm mapped these will both be green and as soon as you map the hand then the shoulder will become yellow and the hand will become yellow it's something weird but that's actually not a cause of concern at the moment because so now if we play this you can see that the animation still plays like normal so even though the control rig has some funky issues with it it's still working now if we were to go to our g8f character that we want transfer the animation to now you'll see you'll have a character one rig in there character one control rig you can select this and now you'll see that your character starts doing the animation of the Maximo character but you'll notice a very obvious problem here see the foots all twisted weird and the arms are not matching either so the only solution that I found for this was that we have to include a step to fix this issue of the arms so now at least we figured out we can map the animations but now we have this problem with this goofy thing of the arms so now let me show you how you do this how you fix this and do it the right way so we're going to start over again create a new scene don't save this alright again what we're going to do is we're going to import a character but this time we're going to import the T pose and import the T pose and now we still don't have a control rig right there's no we can see here there's no control rigs up here so we're still gonna have to create a control rig we're gonna have to define it and we can still use our template so we don't have to map this out manually so we can come in here open whoops I have to make sure that the route bone of like a true of the skeleton I want to create the control rig for selected so the mixer mode rig in this case could open there's our template this is why it's important to use the same character over and over so the bone names and everything doesn't change hit OK and now you'll notice all the bones are green everything is OK in this control rig I don't know why why it has a problem applying the template with the character when it's animated but this seems to solve the issue so now that we've brought in the T pose first then applied the rig or the template to the T post all we have to do is go file import now select the animation let's say import now again I think I played around with a few of these settings here I think it was one of these or it might have been animation range or format I forget exactly would have changed but these are the settings I have so review and make sure you have the same thing and then click import he'll actually put the animation on to that control rig that the character was originally in the T post now we still have these errors being reported over here again so you can see within the T pose no issues so as we go out of the T pose all of a sudden the animation has all kinds of problems but when we now import our character that we want to transfer the animation to all right so we all we do is bring in our character there now we're gonna select our character from the controller up here this is the human eye Kaede snap I probably should have said that earlier anyways once we set the source to the character one rig now you'll notice the arms match and I think the feet look like they're matching a lot better too yep the feet match a lot better now the character does exactly what the animation is so I I can't tell you enough to understand why applying the rig in the tipos first makes the animation work way better but this is the process using this process you can apply mix mo characters to a custom rig and obviously your custom character has to have the the animation it has to your human character has to also have a human ika but that's a one-time setup you should be setting that up anyways for your custom character alright so now you've got the carrot the animation being applied to your character how do we actually transfer it like officially transfer it so you get rid of the mix mo character so for this what you're going to do is you're gonna select your character you want to transfer the animation to so in my case it's this g8f base import here so you know make sure this is selected go over to the green button blue button and click bake now there's a few different options here from what I've read baking to the control rig is better because you can tweak the animation using the control rig if you want to make changes to it before you officially export as xpf if you bake it to the skeleton then I think you're limited and being able to modify the animation I you might have to look into that a little more in a little more detail but that was the brief that I got here if you go to the options I didn't play with any of these really they should be their defaults but just in case I'll show you the settings here so just make sure yours are the same then now you actually beak it and so it'll play through the animation and then I'll actually bake that animation to your control rig for your character so at this point your character your character should have this animation beit's to it so if we yes okay so see now my character is using its own control rig it's no longer using the character one control rig and we play this we still see our character doing the animation that's because we've baked the animation to the control rig of our character so at this point we can actually just delete the mix mo character I just deleted the skeletal structure but here's the the mesh and the other mesh the control rig for that character will still be in here so if you really wanted to clean things up you can trash this now this is the skeleton that was the skeleton we were using or the control rig we were using for that mix of all character originally so now if we look you can see that our custom character is now doing that animation flawlessly so and the mix of all character is no longer in the scene so there you go that is how to fully take a mix mo animation and completely apply it to your custom character

Channel: BKISHDROID

Views: 44,979

Rating: 4.8326359 out of 5

Keywords: mixamo, custom character, rig, animation, Maya, maya, MAYA

Id: pEK7fvAIV_A

Length: 23min 34sec (1414 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 17 2019