Need some advice here. This is more of a technical question than a specific problem I’ve ran into…
I have a humanoid character, rigged and skinned to a simple (few bones) Armature, since I want to export the character to Unity. This Armature has no Ik, constraints nor controllers for now. Let’s call this the game skeleton.
I’ve always heard/read that it’s better not to directly animate the bones. For this reason, I want to create a secondary skeleton (let’s call this the animation skeleton), which will have all ik, controllers and additional bones I might need to do a complex rig setup and animate the character. The game skeleton will be constrained by the animation skeleton so, in the end, I’ll only export the game skeleton, with baked animations, to Unity.
As far as I know, I have two options to create this second skeleton:
Create a second Armature for the animation skeleton.
In the Armature I already have, duplicate all bones and make this second set of bones act as the animation skeleton. All of the bones that belong to the animation skeleton will have their Deform property unchecked, so I can export the Armature with only the game skeleton by unchecking the Only Deform Bones option:
I’ve been doing some research on the subject, but found nothing convincing. Any advice will be helpful!
from a strickly Character Animation Rigging end of things…
Creating two Riggs …
that is to say…
a deformer Rigg
and
a Mechanical Rigg that actually has all the constraints and IK stuff on it is actually quite common once you really start doing lots of Character animation…
In fact I has been my experience that most Serious Animation Riggs actually have 3 layers…
a Deformer Rigg with bones connected to the Skinning envelope…
an IK Rigg… for use in IK animation
an FK Rigg for use in FK animation situations…
Some times this is done simply with ‘layers’ of Riggs on top of each other…
Some times with all the Riggs completely separate from one another…
I use the layer method in blender… just because it’s easier to do it that way…
but in other software I have used it was easier to have the Riggs as totally separate Objects then linked together
so I think your thinking in the right direction by your comments… create a set of deformer bones… then a set of Animation bones that will actually be the bones that move the deformers around and have all your animation constraints and IK stuff in your Game engine…
Yes, those videos are great for learning to think like a rigger, I watched the first of them a pair of years ago. But I doubt they cover the ‘game skeleton exporting’ theme I’m interested on.
Will watch them again when I can to see what I can learn about bone layering.
