How to get Maya animations to work in SL?

[AnnabelleDovelight]

Hello all!

I am having issues getting my animations from maya into sl. I can rig and make the animations just fine... but every single time I import animations to second life with both .bvh and .anim, its all kinda of messed up. I've had complete distortion of my avatar, translations turning into rotations, and all sorts of things. Everything but an animation actually working!

I'm really frustrated right now, and I hope someone out there has successfully used maya to animated and can tell me what you did?

I have both Mayastar and AniMATE in my 2017 Maya. 

Neither the .bvh or.anim exporters work from either Mayastar or AniMATE. 

 

If anyone has any suggestion I would greatly appreciate it  

[OptimoMaximo]

Hi! I replied a few days ago in MyAniMATE group with a notice, but for everyone to see how this tool works, i made this video here on YouTube

I'm also preparing a creature model for showing how to manually animate it. 

However, the main principle behind MyAniMATE .anim export is that what you see happening to the joints on the screen, is what is getting calculated and exported. You might drive the skeleton with a physics simulation, via script, manually animating joints, custom rig or what have you, doesn't matter. Just make sure to follow the video for the few caveats that may have broken your animations so far (i think you've got the "with Translations" checkbox to get the described behavior).

As a general rule for all animators, when you make a custom character that use custom joints position, your animations should use that rig to start from and use ONLY rotation keyframes for all joints but the root joint (hip), which also needs translation keyframes. If you ever make a mistake doing this, disabling the Translation checkbox ensures translation data drop except for the hip. Joint position is a piece of data carried by the mesh already, there's no need to "reinforce" it with animation. Another user case would be to use translations to set a new position for a joint to morph the character into a different shape, but then the animations should keep using just rotations. I hope this makes sense.

[Kira Zobel]

Thank you for all the help you've been providing in here, Optimo!

 

I wanted to revive this, since I spent quite a bit on the Mayastar, and yet exporting animations doesn't work at all.  I've tried it on Maya 2017/18/19.  Has anybody gotten it to work?  I'm really frustrated and obviously can't get a refund.

[OptimoMaximo]

14 hours ago, Kira Zobel said:

Has anybody gotten it to work?  I'm really frustrated and obviously can't get a refund.

As far as i know, animation export works just fine (i did export a set of animations for an avatar just a couple of weeks ago). But i'm talking about the MyAniMATE integration, it's ages by now that i don't use the BVH setup and export, so i can't really tell about it.

So, just to clarify a bit on the process:

you get your avatar from Mayastar in the scene. You can rig whatever you like to it. When ready to animate, you go to the Mayastar menu and choose MyAniMATE LT. It's the LITE version of my more extensive plug in MyAniMATE, but the export routine is basically the same (except that for now it can't export attachment points animations). From the window you get, choose "generate animation skeleton", my scripts will do what necessary and ask you what format you want to export (Bvh or .anim). I usually choose .anim, as the main intent for me in writing this plug in was to be able to export .anim format animations. At this point, you're given the option whether you want a HumanIK rig, or no rig, since you're doing just the ears it doesn't really matter, with the no rig option you would animate the ear joints the same way you would if you chose a HIK rig. Only then, you'll be able to export working animations. Here is the video i did time ago about how to set up your character for animation. You can skip the part where I manually assign the HIK definition because in the meantime iCathy and I have automated the process and it's no longer necessary 

 

Edited November 8, 2019 by OptimoMaximo

[Kira Zobel]

Getting closer!

 

I'm getting this error upon exporting the animation: # Error: file: C:/Users/Obsydian/Documents/maya/2018/scripts/AnimExport.mel line 209: ValueError: file C:/Users/Obsydian/Documents/maya/2018/scripts\AnimDeploy.py line 38: No object matches name: hip.initHeight # 

[OptimoMaximo]

9 hours ago, Kira Zobel said:

ValueError: file C:/Users/Obsydian/Documents/maya/2018/scripts\AnimDeploy.py line 38: No object matches name: hip.initHeight

This means that an attribute on the export skeleton is missing, and both the skeleton and the attribute are created by the script when generating the animation skeleton. So you're either attempting to export the animation from the skeleton you're rigging to, or have deleted one of the generated skeletons, namely the one called hip which is the one used for export sampling, or you haven't generated the skeleton with myanimate and using the animation set up provided with mayastar. There is no way a script "forgets" to do something while completing all the other tasks. 

I suggest you to go through the instructional videos I've put up on yt first. Rigging and animation assumptions in SL assets differ quite a lot from one another and the animation process requires those generated skeletons, setup in a certain way for bvh or for anim exports.

[Kira Zobel]

I'm doing the exact same thing as in the tutorial, save for using a Bento skeleton from MayaStar.

[Kira Zobel]

I'm gonna browse through your other tutorials.  Thank you for all your help! ❤️ Sorry for being a pain