Is this mb file data/structure fine? Multi-mesh, cannot find the node to set hotkeys on. [animating beginner, maya20, w10]

[Anonymous]

I am still a beginner in animating, I come from blender, and I am a great beginner in Maya : I did animate the rocket as in the official youtube tutorial.

I am trying to animate a character, I got this 30MB lambert.mb file  extracted, after some reverse-engineering, from the Witcher3 game.

Is the rig broken? Is the model's node structure "canon"?

If broken (IK seems to be), can it still be animated? Guess so!

I have a very hard time finding the node to set key frames on and getting interpolation. I tried putting all meshes in a character set, I tried parenting all meshes to the body one. I don't get why there are that many animation layers, I don't get at all why the hypergraph is so scattered.

Any help understanding the model structure, and the intended workflow would be much appreciated.

Best regards, Maxime

[jmreinhart]

The file link appears to be broken.

In my experience, when a rig is taken out of a game, all you get is the skeleton and the model, the underlying rig system like ik/fk that the animators interact with don't exist in the game engine. 

[Anonymous]

The file is this one https://mega.nz/folder/KMBHBQzZ#aLQCsUk0OZ50QSCJzWeuIw/file/nExFCJpB

It has been made by this author : https://github.com/dingdio/witcher3-maya-animation

Lambert is the name of the character, it is a coincidence and has nothing to do with Maya's lambert 🙂

Having a bit more understood Maya internals, what the node graph, the outliner are... it looks to me seriously messy, yet any experienced look enjoyed.

[Anonymous]

I am reading Rig it right, so you can spare yourself explaining me the basics : just some boring file support if you will.

[jmreinhart]

The structure of the file is definitely not the structure of the rig the animators work with. When the port it into the engine it gets converted into the format you see in the file, which is good for performance speed in the engine but isn't really useful for anything else.

There are no controls to animate.