Load / Save Animation of all keyframes on a rig

Breinmeester · Post by **Breinmeester** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 8:08 am

Hello everybody!

I've been digging deep into the forum and have found a couple of scripts that allow to save and load animation keyframes.

But none of them do exactly what I'm looking for, which is:
1. A script which saves to a file all keyframes on anything in the rig from the top layer down;
2. A script which can load the saved data to said rig.

I'm animation supervisor for a game studio and we do a lot of different animation cycles on the same rigs which we save to different anme files. I'm now trying to collect some poses and animation bits which i want to create actions for on the main rig. To do so, I need to load different bits of animation we've done onto 1 rig.

Can someone help or direct me towards help?

Thanks in advance!!

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Tue Apr 26, 2011 3:17 pm

heyvern has a script that does exactly that HeyVern's scripts and tools - (focus on bones).

I think it only loads and saves bone animation though, so if you have point or switch animation on any of your layers, it will be ignored.

Breinmeester · Post by **Breinmeester** » Wed Apr 27, 2011 2:43 am

Hey Rudiger! Thanks for your response!!

I've found Heyverne's script and it's great, but...

I need to save all keyframes on everything: bones, points, layers, switch, etc. Anything that would logically be touched to create convincing animation.

We use complex rigs that combine bone animation with points and layer animation and spread different features out over different layers.
This is what the rig looks like in the layer window for our main character Haas:

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Wed Apr 27, 2011 5:03 am

I have in mind a script that could import the main timeline or a named action from another anime file as an action. I already have most of the building blocks I need for going through all animation channels in a document from my KeyTool script. I guess it's a case of whether Heyvern adds other channels to his script before I get around to writing my script.

Breinmeester · Post by **Breinmeester** » Wed Apr 27, 2011 5:38 am

That sounds great! You must be a very busy guy, but this would be very welcome. Thanks for thinking along!

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Wed Apr 27, 2011 7:10 pm

OK, I've started working on it! To justify the time it would take, I think I will put it up for sale at my Content Paradise store for the usual price. I'll post back here when it's up, hopefully before the day is over.

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 2:25 am

OK, the script is done and ready to buy at my Content Paradise store.
RT_ImportAnimation: Import animation from an anme file as an action

Breinmeester · Post by **Breinmeester** » Thu Apr 28, 2011 5:16 pm

Wow, man! That's great!! And very fast too!
I'm going to try and buy it soon!

Rudiger · Post by **Rudiger** » Tue May 03, 2011 4:24 pm

Breinmeester wrote:Wow, man! That's great!! And very fast too!
I'm going to try and buy it soon!

Sure thing!

By the way, it was hard to anticipate all of the ways that people might want to use this tool, so I get kept the functionality pretty basic. However, I put a bunch of hooks in so it could easily be extended with a simple options dialog script:

Disable recursion so only animation from top-level is imported
Import animation from action in source document instead of main timeline
Import animation from a different location in the hierarchy of the source document instead of forcing it to be the same as the current document. Would be useful if the document contained multiple characters, but the source document only 1, or vice versa.

So once you have tried out the script, please let me know if you would find any of these or some other feature useful in your workflow.