Cineversity

Hello guys,

I was wondering if there was a way to copy paste the entire animation of a rig to another identical one.
Indeed, this is always at animation time that we detect rigging and skinning issues.
I always have a rig/skin scene in wich I adjust the rig.
But each time, I correct it, I need to replace it in the animation project. And this is a heavy task when you have a lot of controllers.

Selecting them all and copy/paste just makes a mess in the scene.

We have to take all one by one and sometime track by track to avoid C4D missmacth objects and tracks.

I have to do several back and forth to improve the rig and it makes me crasy.

harvester plugin used to do this but don’t work with C4D rent systemem (It needs serials.

Is there a fonction that I don’t know to do this simply and correctly ?

If not, this is a really needed feature.

Kind regards,

Hi alex,

If the hierarchy is the same, why not store the animation in animation clips?

Once you have the animation stored in those, you can “write” it back to keyframes at any time.
Each clip can be saved, just in case, and you have a backup.

Of course test this carefully, as I have no idea about your set-up.

https://help.maxon.net/c4d/r25/en-us/Default.htm#html/36839.html

All the best

Dr. Sassi - 26 January 2022 10:22 PM

Hi alex,

If the hierarchy is the same, why not store the animation in animation clips?

Actually, this is not exactly what I mean and what I need.

This is an octopus Rig, composed hundreds of bones, linked to splines, and these splines are linked to a lot of controllers,

Early in the project, I had to start animation in several shot to make customers validate the animatik.

But, I have to improve the rig and the skin, and to enjoy a clean scene,symmetry, and to keep all the project up to date, I work in a rigging project, and once my modifications are done, I copy/paste the new Octopus rig/skin in all animation projects to see the changes.
And if there are still issues, I began again ...

Unfortunatly, C4D doesn’t allow to select a full hierachy and just copy paste all the tracks to another identical hierarchy.
I have to take all the controllers one by one, and track by track !
Indeed, if on an object I select xyz position, and if only y and z are animated, when I copy paste it, c4d paste yz to xy.

All these steps are time consuming, source of errors and make me mad.

Any fonction that I don’t know to to this ?

By the way I never use Motion clips, they are to rigid to use. I prefer using a morph with PSR and hierarchy activated and blend rigs with traditionnel keyframes in the timeline.

Once you have the animation stored in those, you can “write” it back to keyframes at any time.

I tried it, in case of, but turning motion clip to key frame add key at each frame, so we loose the original one.
Is there another way to get back the original ?

Hi alex,

Here is a little example:
https://www.amazon.com/clouddrive/share/jI3XHwRLVb77QamoJy5V7v88TCwuYgOBiVTw3VbYzUI

Motion clips have a few options to alter the keyframe information, Blend (transition), and Spline curve adjustments (Advanced> Timing). Hence the per frame keyframes. I can’t see a change for that anytime soon.

The amount of work that you might experience is typically eased by a technical director who takes care of that:
https://www.cineversity.com/vidplaytut/siggraph_2015_rewind_bret_bays_creating_a_character_rigging_pipeline
You will find Bret’s credits in many feature films, some even honored with an Oscar, and this video certainly shows why.

As mentioned above, if any method described in the manual is not leading to the same results as mentioned in the documentation, Tech-support could be the next step to find out what went wrong.

I do not have Bret’s coding skills; that would be a question for the Developer Cafe Forum of Maxon; here, I can only tell that keyframes can be copied and pasted:
https://help.maxon.net/c4d/r25/en-us/Default.htm#html/10612.html#PLUGIN_CMD_465001322

Well, copy and paste (in place) should work if it is the same rig. If not, that is a case perhaps for the support. To have no access to a very special rig and then answer is like putting the hand on the hood of a car as a mechanic and telling how much it will cost. The more you know, the more things might come to mind why it can fail; it might be a long list. I avoid endless guessing games here, as those guesses would cost a lot of time on your side, and most of them are perhaps just being based on past problems that don’t apply anymore or have nothing to do with your setup.

I tested a few cases today with R25, and I can’t see any failure, so things seemed to work, and perhaps the tech support might have a tip for you.
https://www.maxon.net/en/support-center

All the best

Tanks for all these tips.

I watch carefully Bret at Siggraph and it gave me some good tips to optimize my pipes.
I’ll need to watch it again and dig deeper for a further projetcts, because even if I’m not animator, it’s always a good thing to learn from these Master artists

I knew the copy/paste in timeline but often experiment issues with it and even so I just forgot to try it on my Octopus.
I will retest it monday at work.

I saw in Bret’s video that he also use the mini time line to do this king of transfer and it seems to work preety good for PSR.
Unfortunatly it doesn’t take tags (like morphs) into accout except maybe if a Mroph deformer is added to the geo.
Need to dig, again.

Thank you for your time !

I have an animator now but he come from Maya and Max so just discover C4D.
I will test all of this with him and keep you in touch of the results if I have a new question on it.

Thank you

Hi alex,

Yes, Bret is great.

Thanks for the feedback. Yes, testing is always a good idea.

Artists coming from other major packages often try to find the same workflow as they are used to, which will not work well often. There is often that claustrophobic feeling when the muscle memory of an application can’t be used in another app. This often leads to frustration. As a reminder, that works in both directions, and I hope that little thought allows for some patience and an open mind toward the “new” application.

I’m glad you ask, and we can hopefully find a way for you that fits.

Enjoy your weekend