Hello! I’ve recently hired an artist to create, rig and animate a character for a project I’m working on. Unfortunately, during the middle of the project, he said he wouldn’t be able to produce the animations, so he just sent me the source Max file with the model and the rig. It is using the standard Max biped.
Problem is: I’m on Linux and I use Blender. If I export the Max file as an FBX or Collada file, will I be able to retain the rig information, or just the bones? If just the bones, is there a way to use Rigify or any other add-on to create a rig on top of the existing skeleton? And then I can apply other animations (for example, Mixamo) to this skeleton?
.fbx should import bones only-- parenting, yes; constraints or drivers or whatever 3DS’s equivalent is to those, no. I’m pretty sure collada’s the same way.
You kinda could attach an existing armature to a Rigify rig. There are a number of different ways to do it, ranging from just renaming the existing weight groups, to parenting or child-of’ing deforming bones to Rigify’s deforming bones, to even more complicated.
But what’s going to be ideal depends heavily on what kind of model you have and what kind of animations you want. I don’t know what a standard Max biped rig looks like, but it doesn’t sound super complicated. I wouldn’t at all be surprised if the easiest thing was to just make whatever rig elements you need from scratch.
You can import animations onto any kind of rig. The most important thing is simply to have the same names for the bones. However, if you don’t match the parenting and local axes expected by those animations, they won’t look right. (There are always solutions to this, but sometimes they’re tedious.)
It also seems to me that, since you’re talking about paid work, that it wouldn’t be too hard to hire somebody for this kind of work. Hopefully, since the artist can’t meet all of the original goals, you’re not paying what you originally intended, so there’s some money to spare.