Animating a Human Rig Workflow

Hey,

We have a perfectly rigged character as (.fbx), but for some reason the bones structure is lost when the character is imported in Blender, everything is fine in Unity. Could someone give me some ideas what I need to request to the guy making the animations (considering he is doing it for a first time) in Blender, so they can work with our character as well ? I was thinking about telling him to use a character that has a humanoid rig and then just send me the rig without the mesh so I can map the animations in Unity to our character using Mecanim, but I am not exactly sure if that's how things work.

 

The bone hierarchy should correctly import in Blender. If for some reason it doesn't, your animator can a) use the BOS FBX importer (careful, only works up to Blender 2.74, so import with that, then open .blend in 2.78+) or b) import via Collada instead of FBX, assuming you have an Autodesk product to open .fbx and save as .dae.

Be aware that your animator will have to add IK modifiers and all the gimmicks himself unless he wants to hand-position every single bone.

You might also run into some trouble using animations created in Blender on the existing .fbx rig. Due to the Z-up/Y-up conversion, my Blender rigs always end up with really weird bind pose transforms on all bones. A Blender rig w/Blender animations works A-OK despite this, but I have never tried creating animations in Blender and playing them on a, say, Maya-created .fbx.

 

What if he uses an existing rig that works in Blender and just exports the rig, since its a humanoid, I guess it will work perfectly find on my human character in Unity ?

 

It might be possible to make that work.

But rigs still vary. Mecanim's "Humanoids" only identify a subset of a rig's bones so it can do hand/foot placement IK and such. The fine-positioning of those bones inside the body, whether limbs use a segmented bones (i.e. 2 or 3 bones for forearm to prevent the "candy wrapper effect" when hand twists) and extra bones for hair, equipment, etc. are still up to the individual rig.

I'd try importing the rig into Blender, then create a second rig with Rigify that matches the imported rig as good as possible, then add "Copy Transform" modifiers to the imported rig's bone so they take over the bone positions from the Rigify pose. That way, it might not even be relevant if the rig loses its structure (otoh, I've used Blender since 2009 and never had any imported FBX rig lose structure - could it be that you artist is in edit mode, or the bones are not set to 'connected' or something that just gives that impression?)

 

The character is from DAZ, I also figured out I can export as collada (.dae) and since Ive never used blender I have no idea if the bones are setup correctly or not, I can't even see them, the only thing I can see is the names but no the actual bones, see this screenshot - http://i.imgur.com/PblvSQu.png
The perfect thing would be to send this character to the guy who is making the animations but since I am not sure if the bones are placed right or if they are any bones at all, I cannot send it to him.
If you have skype / discord I can send you the character if you wish or it would be easier to talk there, I will really appreciate it !

 

That looks okay to me

You can make the bones visible / check their structure in these spots:

 

This is what I get when I check X-Ray http://i.imgur.com/esJpTis.png
To be honest I expected to see something like this http://i.imgur.com/7cZVFnY.jpg
I am still not sure if our character is ready to be animated out of the box or we have to add more stuff to it. What are the next steps we should take in order to prepare it for animations ?