Re: Free Download 3d Maya Rigged Characters
Tommasa Gaetz
Hello! I am new to this forum. I have a question about Maya texture. I have used Maya before but not for too long. It's still new to me but I am getting used to it now. So, I download a character from a website. To be more specific, a rigged character that has it's own texture. The problem I am having is how in the world can I apply the texture to the character. For example, the pants, skin, etc. I looked for some tutorial but I keep finding videos showing you how to texture it yourself but nothing on how to apply the texture that came with the character.
You should check if there are already some materials and textures loaded in the scene. Open the hypershade, in the materials tab you should see some shaders and in the textures tab there should be some texture nodes. If that's the case then you just have to open the texture nodes (just click on one of them and press ctrl+a to open the attribute editor) and in the "image name" field check the path to the texture files. usually if the model was created by someone else the paths to the files have to be set because they are different on your system.
If no shader is present then you can create one in the hypershade, or just select the mesh in the viewport,right click and hold and select "assign new material". Then in the new material click on the little checker button on the right of the "color" parameter, select "file" to load a file texture, and select the texture on the hard disk.
I figure out how to apply it. It looks like I also have to press 6 in order for the texture to show on the character. Also, if I add an extra object apart from the character, where can I see the amount of objects I have in the scene? For example, in Cinema 4D you have a toolbar in the right side where you can see everything you have on the scene, so where can I see that in Maya?
In main menu go to Windows>Outliner, or you can toggle btn layout of Perspective and Outliner on the toolbox for older version, but Maya 2017 allow you to toggle Outliner directly from Toolbox, look for something with this icon n
Now I am having another problem. This time is with the characters. I am rendering with mental ray and the characters and the actual lighting is black. However, I have a room where the characters are inside but apparently the room can be seen when rendered except the characters which are black.
Whenever I apply any type of lighting that is not from Mental ray it renders black. As of now I am just using the default lighting because of that. Also, I am having trouble with one of the objects. When I try to move it Maya completely freezes. I can't quit the program, I can't do anything. As you can see in the scene I posted, you can't see anything when render even using Final Gathering. I don't really want to use that either way just because it takes way too long to render.
Here there is a mistake, you failed to position a light, 2nd normals are pointing outward thus can't be loighted as they are black, normals should always point to light, for convinience purpose rotate those NURBS then always press 7 use all lights, then scaling Spotlight doesn't matter incase of lighting, only scaling Area Light will affect your lighting.
Hello! I'm just curious but why exactly do you have to rotate each object or part of an object? For the character, I know how to apply the color and I have had rendered it with the color but for some reason now it is not rendering with the color. Also, how can I speed the mental ray whenever I use final gathering it gets slower? I also forgot to mention. Where you able to move the character? It seems that whenever I click and drag the arrow to move him Maya freezes.
I understand how to get the color on the character except that sometimes mental ray renders it in black even with the color applied. Also, did you managed to move the character because each time I try to move the arrow Maya completely freezes.
It was working before but suddenly now I can't press and drag it without Maya freezing. I left it to see if it was slow but nothing happened. It completely froze and I couldn't quit the program so I had to use task manager.
Hey everyone. I'm Sam, creative director for Rokoko, and welcome to this ultimate retargeting tutorial for motion capture in Maya. So I say ultimate kind of tongue in cheek because this is CG. And so this workflow is just one of a million different ways that you could do retargeting in Maya. Workflows may differ depending on your specific needs, but this is the workflow that I personally use and can recommend. And even if you're a veteran Maya master, there might be a few tidbits in here that might help you in your retargeting motion captured journey.
So, we are going to get a character, we're going to rig it on Mixamo, but this would work with any rigged character that you might have made or found online. We're gonna download that character. We're gonna get some motion capture into Maya. We're gonna characterize our motion capture and our character. We're gonna retarget our motion capture onto our character.
In my personal opinion, Maya is the best program in which to do retargeting. It just has some secret sauce that makes foot positioning and other things really easy to do. I really recommend this workflow for high-end motion capture.
So we've already got some motion capture recorded. I recorded this in the new Rokoko Studio, but this whole workflow would work with motion capture that you recorded in Rokoko Studio Legacy or motion capture you recorded using the new free Rokoko Video tool, which is the free ai mocap tool that we just released. So we play back this motion capture.
You can see it's just body and hands data, not face. That'll be another video. And do my karate kick, you know, looking good, touching the top of my head. And you can see with the clapping too, our hands aren't quite connecting where they should be, right? And I did that on purpose. This is typical of inertial motion capture. You might not, you know, touch everything perfectly every time. And that's why it's super important. We're gonna be going through how to do a little cleanup in Maya too, which is really easy in Maya. So that's at the end of the video. You can use the chapter markers to skip around if you want. And yeah, there we go. So we're not gonna go over how to record this. We have lots of tutorials about that. Check our YouTube channel or the description below if you want to know how to record your motion capture. We just wanna know about retargeting this motion capture in Maya.
So we've got our mocap, I'm going to right click add to export list. It was already in the export list, so I just removed it and added it. Again, we don't need a body mesh, we just want the skeleton. We don't need a face because there's no face data. We're gonna export an fbx. And for skeleton preset, we want to go down and click Human IK. So this is a standard Maya skeleton, so we want to use that when we're going into Maya under preset overrides. I also like to go in and under rest pose. I typically just make this t pose. You probably don't have to in Maya, but it's good practice I find to go ahead and do that under more settings. You know, we're going to export it at 30, you can do it at a hundred or whatever you want. Shouldn't really make a big difference in this workflow and we're gonna hit export.
So now we need to go and find a character that we're going to rig on Mixamo, and we're just gonna rig it on Mixamo because it's a good base. It's what a lot of characters kind of their skeletons have, especially for beginners. And I'm just gonna go find a free character model on Sketchfab. And then we're gonna rig that on Mixamo. So I typed in, you know, TPOs and I found this model. So we'll hit download. We're just gonna download an OBJ again, there's tons of tutorials out there for how to use Mixamo of rig characters. You know, I'll let you kind of go and figure that out on your own.
It's very simple, but I just wanted to show the whole process. So here we go. Here's our character. You know how it works with Mixamo. We'll rig it up. There we go. Rigged looks pretty good, although when the arms go up, it probably looks pretty funky, but we're just gonna keep it hit next. There we go. And we are going to download this in a T pose. So we'll type in T pose and we will download FBX 30 with skin. There we go.
So it's finally time to open up Maya. So let's launch Maya. So I'm gonna be working in Maya 2022. This also works, this whole workflow works in Maya 23. And in pretty much any version of Maya you might have, this workflow has not changed a lot since at least 2018, Maya 2018. So this workflow should, should work for you really no matter what.
Here we are, we are now in Maya, and the first thing we're going to do is go and import the model that we just downloaded. We'll hit import and there we go. We have our whole model and you can see all the joints here. And so I'm importing the model first, because normally what I do is I go in and I characterize this model. I basically get it all ready to receive motion capture, then I save a nice clean version of this project file. And anytime I want to use this model in the future, I can just open up that project file, it's all ready to go. I put in my motion capture and I keep, I keep moving. So how do we prepare this model for motion capture? So you can see all of the joints here, and I'm actually gonna go to show and turn that off cuz I don't wanna see it.
But what we need first and foremost is for our model to mean a t pose. So no matter what model you're using, again, this workflow can work with non Mixamo models. But either way, your model does need to be in a T pose for Maya. So if you download your model, and let's say it's in an A pose, you know, like this, you would just want to go in and I, I mess with the shoulder, so that looks weird. But you would want to go in, rotate things around so that it's in a proper T pose. And additionally, beyond that, what we, what we also want to do is go in and make sure that our thumbs are lying flat against the hand. And that is because, so we're gonna move this up a little bit. That is because we want our model's initial pose.
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