So we have a set of biped characters all sharing the same skeleton. It’s working great, small goblin ,big goblin etc… Now I am animating a chicken with a completely different skeleton. The designer wants to have the shared biped skeleton used for the chicken and wants me to add joints that I need to it, but retain the basic skeleton. This makes no sense to me. I can see having a basic biped, quadraped, bird class for skeletons. What is the best practice for this?
Well it’s possible, you could have a bunch of different skeleton hierarchies using one skeleton. The skeletal meshes would then use the bones they need. I think it would become pretty hard to use though with a bunch of control rigs in the same thing. Or maybe you could export with the massive skeleton and just animate using another rig that fits the character you’re working on, then retarget to the actual character.
You can’t really share animations between them if the characters are so different though so maybe there’s not a lot of benefit to having a shared skeleton.
Thanks cyaoeu. The creatures are very different, so sharing the biped on the birds and quadrupeds really wouldn’t work. We decided to have base biped rig and will have a dragon/monster rig to start with for the quadrupeds.
In theory a human and a chicken have the exact same anatomical base structure. The entire hierarchy can be the same. Chicken has a finger and a toe less, and a tail, but the rest is totalyl reuseable. The reason behind it however and whether it actually benefits your production given such different shapes is a different story. But if you had to animatie the transformation from a chicken to a man, you certainly could (if you make them use the same skeletal hierarchy)