Is there a way for me to copy over a rig to another Character

[tevin93]

I am working on two characters that have the same mesh and same armour pieces. I have managed to create a full rig with controls and driven keys for the hands as well as a IK_FK switch for one of the characters. Is there a way for me to copy over that rig to the other character without losing the driven keys and all the other stuff that I have done.  I want to try and not the work I have done and have to do it all over again for the second character as I am not good with rigging and most of this was done through a tutorial on youtube.Or is there a way I can create the quick rig with the finger joints 

Both characters have the same geometrey and armour pieces with the only difference being that one of them does not have the head mesh in the hood but instead has a maskHandcontrol that has driven keys and the IK_FK switchDriven keys and IK_FK_Switch

[stephenkmann · Accepted solution]

seems like you can just save your file. 

import in the mask , and bind it to your rig.

, delete the hood

and save it as the second character file

or just include the mask in the original rig, with a switch to hide/show the mask and hood

hth

[tevin93 · Accepted solution]

The problem is I was hoping to have both characters in the scene at the same time. They will be fighting each other. I have heard one person say that if I save the masked character under a different name then import the masked character back in as a new character that has been rigged and skinned, it will work and I will be able to have both characters in the scene at the same time both with the same rig. in another forum someone said to fbx the rig out 

I dont know if this is viable option.

The concept of it is that it will be the main character fighting his inner demon who's clothing is like his but the demon has a mask.

I'm using maya 2017 if thats important.

[jwlove · Accepted solution]

Like previous poster said, you could open your rig file, import the other character's geo, bind it to your rig, copy the weights over, delete the old geo, and then save this as a new rig.

You will want to ensure the name is different from the other rig file.  You can then import both into the same scene and it should work.  Some precautions you may want to also take would be to rename some stuff to ensure there are no node name clashes - but this can also be handled by using the name-space options when importing the two files.

BUT, I think the best idea would actually be to include the mask geometry from the other character into your first rig.  You said everything else is essentially the same, so if you include the mask in the rig, you can create a visibility switch to hide the mask.  Then import the rig twice with two different name spaces and hide the mask on the appropriate imported rig.  You could also do some stuff to switch the materials/colors along with hiding the mask if you need to, but you may just want to handle all the texture assignments after importing your rig twice...

Really, whatever makes more sense to you would probably be the best way to go.

[stephenkmann · Accepted solution]

i think what you are missing , is that you want to have a rig file.. and then also an animation file. 

most common practice is to reference the rig file into the animation file, and then animate it there. 

the reference allows you to make changes and updates to the rig file, and then it shouldn't break your animation file, but still get's the updates.

  you can then reference as many characters as you want..   using namespace on reference will automatically add a number to the namespace, to try and alleviate clashing node names: 

ie:  bill: ,bill1:, bill2:, etc 

hth