We’re having a very frustrating time trying to figure out how to get a custom avatar that is rigged and animated in Maya to import into Roblox Studio as a custom avatar with working animations. We’ve searched everywhere and can’t seem to find any decent, up-to-date documentation. Is there any? We’ve pieced together tidbits here and there, but it would be really nice to see something fully explained.
We’ve found examples and bits of information on Humanoid rigs, but almost nothing for non-humanoid (custom) avatars.
We have managed to get a Maya rig with bound-skin to import and animate properly, but unfortunately can’t figure out how to get attachments (or anything other than the visual skin) to move with the animation. So while it looks great, we can’t get other aspects of the character to move with the animation. (for attachments, collision detection, etc.)
Help we need…
Documentation! If there is any hiding somewhere?
Example model/rig/animation that we could download, view in Maya, and understand how it translates to Roblox.
A description of the required layout of meshes/joints in Maya and what Roblox does on import. Does it look for specific names, extensions? Is that just for humanoids? What does the animation importer look for and translate to in Roblox?
there is a mention of Maya fbx - roblox custom character import
but following the guidelines seemingly results in meshes, and motor6d’s that don’t corrospond to joint placement in maya. ( C0 and C1 values )
@iceman_137 let me know if you ever got it working
has anyone successfully imported a maya fbx rig ?
" Motor6D is correctly generated on each _Geo mesh that was under an empty with Part1 being the respective _Geo mesh, but Part0 for every M6D is RootPart instead of the parent mesh.
The pivot point for every M6D is in the center of RootPart , which further prevents any attempt to animate the rig correctly."
^ this is what im experiencing as well. found in a report:
Thanks for the pointers. I had seen those docs previously, but not that bug report, so it’s something to follow.
We tried so many permutations trying to get the Custom importer to work as expected, we finally gave up and implemented a painfully complex workaround. As mentioned previously, our animations (which are using bound skin) worked, and looked good. But we couldn’t get any of the mesh parts to move with the bones, (or attachments). All the mesh parts stayed perfectly still during the animation. As a workaround, we ended up scripting the movement of the mesh parts we cared about every frame. This was done by adjusting their Motor6D based on the Bones. It was a bit of a nightmare, but it’s working (for now). It felt so wrong having to move the parts ourselves, which the animation should have been doing.
We’re still using the Custom import as our four-legged characters had even more problems using R15 import. But we then ran into a ton of issues trying to use a non-humanoid character. So now we hack in a Humanoid to the model after the fact (by script) to workaround all the other issues. It’s been a battle, but we’re getting there.
ah yeah i see your predicament, and i guess youve already considered skinning manually placed attachments, or they need to be under the joints as they should, etc. (which on second thought is probably not possible)
best of luck to you guys too, i found a tolerable workflow, using r15 import, and non-skinned meshes.