Luke was on leave so he left us a video-lesson explaining how to retarget data on any rig in Maya. It’s a fairly straightforward process which will make animation a lot faster. We could use any rig and character from Luke’s library, so I used the Hip Hop Dancing 1 rig retargeted on the Punk Bob character:
First of all, open up the scene and then save it as another scene. Then, get the character in a T pose. To do this, you need his joints/skeleton to be visible and you do this by clicking on the ‘Do Not Touch’ option in the Display menu (bottom right). That option almost always indicates the rig itself. Then you have to group items you want to change, so if you want to group the left shoulder and left arm, you click on the shoulder and press ctrl+G and then rotate it to the position you want. Repeat this process for the other shoulder and arm.
Next you click on the little human logo in the top left corner. That’s the Human IK system. You then click on the rig itself, click on ‘define skeleton’ and then click on Create Custom Rig Mapping. This is so you can link the actual joints of the rig to where they are supposed to be in the character. Then click on the Definition tab, and start matching the rig joints to the character. When they turn green that means that they matched correctly. Once it’s all matched, save it. Unlock the rig, and click on the little human logo furthest to the right and a new Custom Rig tab will appear. You now have to match again the rig joints to your chosen character, but hopefully it’ll do most of them automatically. Don’t bother matching the hips for this step as it’ll just confuse Maya. Once this step is completed save it again.
You can import any mocap now by drag-and-dropping into Maya directly. Right click on the rig and click on Assume Preferred Angle, and the rig will go to its T pose. Under the Definition tab you click on the + symbol under the Human IK logo, and it creates a new character for it. Most of the mocap we have are under Mixamo rig, so click on Browse and find it. Then under Character, click on Character 1 (which would be Punk Bob) and under Source select Character 2 (which is the character you just brought in). Press play, and the mocap will have applied.
Once this whole process is done, you still have to go through it and fix the animation where needed as mocap is very rarely completely perfect. If you want to change the mocap you can just select a new one and drag-and-drop it into Maya and it will change automatically. Before editing and fixing your animation you must save and bake the animation. You can do this by saving first and clicking on the Human IK logo, and click Bake. Then, select all your controls and in the bottom right corner you click on Animation Layers and create a new animation layer and ‘Add Selected Objects’. What this does is it keeps all the mocap data as it is but it allows you to select keyframes on top, so you can still fix things.
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