WIP Train #21 - Setting up a character in Maya (Patreon)

To address some of the questions about the workflows we use, we're going to start a little series that will go into detail about how things come together, from setting up a scene, animation, physics simulation to video editing and sound editing. I think this will be particularly interesting for fellow animators but it will also provide a look behind the scenes  for fans :)

A good place to start is setting up a character. One of the reasons we've moved to Maya (currently 2018) is because it's the industry standard in character animation. I started out as a hobbyist in Poser with a short stint in Daz Studio. Both are good for creating still images, but they’re dismal in their animation capabilities. So the solution was to assemble assets in Daz Studio and to then convert and move them to Maya and to set up the character rigs there.

We knew that Tara and Sayako weren't going to be the only characters to bring to life, so we adopted the following workflow to allow transfer of characters en masse:

1.  First we set up the character in their default pose with their final textures, hair and clothing in Daz Studio.

2.  We then create a full body morph of the character’s final body and face shapes. This allows us to import this individual morph as one blend shape as well as any other morphs we want to transfer, like big boobs / butt blend shapes and facial expressions.

3.  Dickgirl characters have a custom cock graft, which then transfers as a single mesh into Maya.

4.  We then export and import it as an FBX into Maya (these days you can use the Daz to Maya tool). These are the export settings we use.

5.  In Maya we created a script to move multiple blend shapes, but it's also possible to move individual blend shapes using the 'Shapes' tool. All morphs use the same Genesis 3 Female base shape which makes them compatible with our rigs.

6.  To complete the transfer we do these four things:

6.1  We move the main full body shape to create the base character shape.
6.2  We then move all main body texture maps. We can re-use the skin shaders for the most part.
6.3  We attach all the clothing via wrap deformer, copying the skin weights or re-skinning and rigging them.
6.4  Finally we move the mesh hair and attach it to the scalp or create new strand based hair using Ornatrix.

In short, this workflow gives us access to the complete character asset library of Daz with the full capability of maya's animation tools.

Hope that was useful to some. :) Feel free to ask questions about anything.