Viewing and Exporting Witcher 3 Animations in Maya 2020 - dingdio/witcher3-maya-animation GitHub Wiki
Load tools and import actor reference
Install the Witcher 3 Tools and add them to your Maya Shelf. Click File->Create Reference... using the Maya menu. Load lambert.mb character. This can be downloaded from the mega folder inside the "entity" subfolder:
This character was created using the entity importer part of the tools. This uses "w2ent.json" files. Importing characters with all their face poses can take about a minute so it's best to save the character as a Maya scene file once you import it once. A tutorial for the w2ent files will be created once it's developed more.
The important thing is you have this "Witcher Name" in the extra attributes of the group and the skeleton is under the "lambert" name space (indicated by "lambert:" tag being next to every skeleton joint in the Outliner)
"lambert_anim_skel" group is the most important thing here. It is the 94 bone "man_base" skeleton that drives everything and what you target all animations too. Lambert also has a humanIK setup for easy retargeting of motion capture and an IK control rig.
Load an animation to the actor
Click File->Import w2anims.json. Select an animation set that was exported from Wolven-kit.
Got to the "Animation Set" to load animations exported from the game.
Baking Your Animation.
- Select all the joints of the animation skeleton
- Highlight the translate and rotation channels and bake the keys to 30fps.
Baking without actor hack
If you want to target a skeleton that doesn't have an actor attribute such as an imported basic rig just add a ciri namesspace. ciri is the default namespace.
Exporting baked animation
- IMPORTANT: Type in the path of your Target Rig. Just type it in if you don't want to import a new skeleton. Rigs for men and women are in the mega folder. Currently only animations targeted to men and women can be imported with Wolven-kit but this is just a UI issue that will be resolved soon.
- Select target Actor on the left
- Type in your animation name
- Click export next to animation name
This should then save the json file that can be imported into the game.