Is there a built in body rig build for Maya, or will there be in the future or is the expected workflow for us to build our own rigs and push the “drv” joints?
Yes! You choose choose to download ‘Source’ assets in addition to ‘Unreal’ assets. There can then be exported in Maya, where you will have a face and body rig, allowing you to animate your MetaHuman there, and then bring those animations into Unreal. You also get the source textures, which you could modify and re-import into Unreal.
See this doc for more info:
https://docs.metahuman.unrealengine.com/en-US/HowTos/ExportingMetaHumans/
Hey
Thanks for the reply, I had already done the process you speak of before I posted. What you end up with isn’t a animator friendly rig for the body. The face is, but the body is clearly not designed to be hand animated in Maya as is.
As you can see from this image, you get a face rig, but just simple joints as “drivers” that runs the correctives, no IKFK, reverse foot setup, friendly animators controls etc.
Epic will have this stuff, and there is the UE Control Rig version of it, but I’m just wondering what the intended workflow is. Obviosuly I can wrap my own body rig to the drivers joints if thats my only option.
In the MetaHuman Maya Export documentation it says - ’ When you export your MetaHuman, you only get some of the assets which includes the Face Rig. Clothing, hair, and body rig are not part of the assets that are included.’
I guess the best way to animate this in Maya would be to hook up the driver skeleton to something like an AdvancedSkeleton Rig as that can plug itself into other skeletons like Mixamo as well, you just have to tell it what bone is what. If Unreal won’t provide a body rig then that’s what I will be doing.
My issue currently is that when I try exporting the animated metahuman skeleton back to Unreal and then apply it to the metahuman in Sequencer, he grows in size and changes proportions slightly. I guess it’s the whole retargeting that has to be done on it, although I find it weird considering that the proportions should already be the same if it’s the same skeleton in Maya as the one in Unreal for that same Metahuman
I’ve not tried exporting it yet but yeah, thats a bit weird, be nice if that pipeline was clearer. And yeah I was gonna just wrap another rig round the body.
The original press release sounded like it was gonna have a rig " Users will also get the source data in the form of a Maya file, including meshes, skeleton, facial rig, animation controls, and materials."
ta
Thanks for the feedback!
You make a really good point that the pipeline needs to be clearer. This is something I want to improve in the documentation over time, but just wasn’t feasible for release docs.
Now that MHC early access is released, we can take a step back and look at some of the gaps in pipeline/workflow/how-tos/etc that we want to fill. We’ll be working to continually update and add these types of things to the docs site in time!
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Thanks for the reply. Yeah looks like the loop from bridge, to maya, to playing it on your character in UE is a little clunky right now. The hierarchy in maya isnt the same as whats in UE and I’m seeing some folks on twitter unsure on getting it running. It’s a great start though, truly world leading stuff!
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I’m one of the people confused on twitter 
This documentation is great: Exporting MetaHumans to Autodesk Maya | MetaHuman Creator Documentation
But how to roundtrip back to UE once it’s animated in Maya? The face rig doesn’t seem to have a root bone and the face rig joints have a namespace in front that don’t seem to match the UE skeleton. So when using Game Exporter or Send To Unreal I get this error usually or if I can get it exported via an fbx the animation doesn’t come along with it in UE:
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As a follow-up, I created a tutorial to demonstrate how to get the facial rig animation out of Maya and into Unreal. Based on yesterday’s livestream, it’s the same process for the joints (select the selection set of the body) to export. But I haven’t tested this yet.
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Any update on body control rigs in Maya? I’m trying to also figure out how to apply Human IK-format mocap to the Metahuman body in Maya. It’s hurting my tiny brain.
If it helps anyone browsing, i found this YouTube tutorial that covers adding the HumanIK control rig to a Metahuman inside Maya. The name of the video is a little misleading but it really does have a useful overview of the steps involved https://youtu.be/r9u5Z6K-3zo
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Hi,
I’ve got a custom control rig script for Maya as well as some workflow and face anim tools as well.
http://www.madguru.com/metahuman
Hope it helps.
Adnan Hussain
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