Videogame Character Development - Animation Extension Task

As an extension task to this character development unit, I have been tasked with animating my character using Adobe's 'Mixamo' tool set, this is a very easy tool used for rigging a biped character and as such is very useful not only for this project, but may be useful for my own projects in the future also.

I started by assuring my character was exported as a .fbx file, with 'embed media' ticket to carry across both the normal and diffuse textures.

From here, I imported the .fbx into the Mixamo site and was presented with a rigging screen, here I placed markers for the chin, elbows, wrists, groin and knees of my character, upon confirmation of the placement I clicked next and the software proceeded to auto-rig my character.



Once rigged, I exported my character model once again in .fbx format ready for use in Maya, the model was imported with the auto-rigged skeleton attached.
To complete the rigging process and gain access to control points within Maya I needed to download and install a scripting tool, this meant loading and executing a python script within the script editor in Maya, making sure the Python tab was selected prior to import to avoid any import issues.

Once the script had been loaded and executed from the correct file path (documents\maya\scripts), the character was selected and the script was run, taking the data from my character's skeletal rig and transferring the data into a set of controls which I could use in software for animation.

I began experimenting with the control options, changing the FK/IK values to allow myself control of the hands especially, but moving and rotating the control points as desired to position my character from a T-pose into an idle fighting pose.

I have currently posed my character in an idle fighting position, and will experiment further with animating my character in Maya, and update this blog for my own reference in due course.