Importing animation to referenced character in Maya

[saftret]

Hi!

I have a rigged HumanIK character in Maya that I have imported to my MotionBuilder project. I have all my mocap data in that project and I have that plotted to the control rig of my character. 

I was thinking of referencing both the character and our environment scenes into a new scene in Maya for each take. The problem I'm having now is getting the animation data from MotionBuilder onto the referenced characther in my Maya scene. How do I get the animation over?

Am I approaching this from the wrong angle? Should I do it differently? Please feel free to suggest a new workflow, as I'm pretty new to all this MotionBuilder stuff.

I'm using 2014 versions of Maya and MotionBuilder.

Best regards,

Stig

[paula44]

Hi Stig,

Your workflow is very good, as it should be. You open your Maya and MoBu scenes. In MoBu you select in Scene your character with Select branches and then File/Send to Maya/update current scene. And it is done. If it is not working you can select your character in Maya before sending it, but I don't think it is necessary.

Regards

Paula

[saftret]

Thank you for your answer.

Unfortunately I'm not getting it to work. What exactly should I select in MotionBuilder and in Maya?

I only get a new skeleton with the animation when I send the MoBu data to Maya. Do you think that maybe it has to do with the referencing of the character in my scene?

It just doesn't seem to update the skeleton that's already in the Maya scene.

[jae.chung]

Hi, 

Having a model as a reference in Maya should not affect the behavior of Send-To.

But what's suspicious is the fact that you get a new skeleton when you send the file to Maya.

First thing I would suggest is to check the naming in both applications and to see whether MoBu renames the model (or add Namespace) when you bring the model to MoBu.

Maya doesn't support the same name on different objects, but MoBu does when object types are different. 

Next thing you could try is to plot the animation from control rig to skeleton before you send the animation to Maya.

Maya: Send To MotionBuilder > Send as new scene

MoBu: Make animation changes then either > Send to Maya > Update Current Scene 

                                                           or click Update next to "Connected to Maya" in your viewport

Hope this works.