Stupid stuff that doesn't make sense (maya is posessed)

Anna and Dan finished (kinda) their models so that I could skin them to the animated rigs and add the blend shapes. This took a long time because Maya's history system sucks and caused a new problem every ten minutes. After I had the characters in a state where they could be imported into the blocked out scene and have their animation clips timed out.... that's what I did. This was all fine for a while, at least until things like this started happening:

So apparently the zombies skin weights are stupid?! This happened every time I reopened a saved file. It was fixed easily enough by just using the paint skin weights tool and clicking on the mesh and they reset to where they should be which makes complete sense : However, the last time I tried to use that little trick to sort the problem out I got a big red cross through the paint weights tool (as you can see in the image above) which apparently means "NOO!! yous not paintin no skin weights here bruv innit". To add to Maya's insults it decided to throw this at me:


Its obvious why this has happened.... isn't it?

Well at least i knew it had something to do with blendsahpes.

OOOk so the only solution i came up with was to re-import the zombie character but this meant I would have to re-time out all of the animation clips which I had spent days doing. To get over this I merged all the clips into one and the exported that as a new one so that I could import it back in to the new zombie. The first problem with this is that when you merge clips it sets keys for every attribute of every object in the character set ON EVERY FRAME!!!! This makes it pretty hard to edit later so its a good job I was happy with most of the animation on the zombie. The other problem with this is that the global control was not included in the character set for good reason!! It wasn't included so that the whole character could be moved and scaled independent of the rest of the characters animation. So the animation I had done on it for when the character needed to move where i had done on the spot walk cycles and where i had repositioned her between shots was gone. I decided to make a new character set for the global control and make an animation clip out of the animation on it to re-import onto the new zombie. This seems to have worked for the time being.

At least Tala didn't have any problems....

Shit.

So this is the other thing that happened whenever I reopened a scene. Her lower body stayed in the same pose that it was in when the scene was saved for the whole animation. again i found a way to get round this by activating and then deactivating the keys for the animation clips. I didn't find a permanent way of fixing this.

So it came to the time when i needed to show the animation to the rest of the group. I open up the scene and we all nearly cried:




If you hadn't noticed, all of Tala's animation is messed up.

I tried the the tricks from before but nothing happened. Thankfully though, it worked fine when I got home and opened it on my PC. Question is will we be able to render at college?!?!

On top of this I had problems creating the blending animations between clips which were so easy to do in my initial tests. Then I had to add the particles which are a pain in themselves. Then there was all the parenting animation I had done for the weapons that couldn't be copied across. And then just the general lining up of animation with both the characters.

*SIGH*