The single hierarchy is completely driven by the rest of the rig using constraints. This was the best method that I could come up with that would make exporting to an engine the easiest, and still maintaining almost the same level of control that the original joint hierarchy has.

What I recommend is once you are ready to export your rig, select all the single hierarchy joints, then bake animation. This will add keys to all your joints. Then, delete all the constraints on the joints. At this point, the single hierarchy rig should have zero dependencies to the rest of the rig.

If this doesn't seem sufficient, let me know and I can maybe add some additional functionality to the UI that will streamline exporting.

-Dustin

Thanks for the prompt response. The overhead in the engine caused by this rig is not really enough to worry about overall, the game engine bakes in the animation into the mesh upon import, I was just thinking if it was a simple addition or fix then great if not then it is not the end of the world either. It would just help maintain a cleaner workspace in the engine.

Regards;

Steve

Are you exporting the entire rig to the engine, or just the single hierarchy? Or is it baking the animation to each vertex of the mesh?

The engine reads the raw maya file and treats it like an FBX, baking in the animation into the mesh when this option is enabled. When the maya file is altered it will re-import. However in the files hierarchy in the engine it shows all of the nodes and rig group data. Stripping that out will decrease overhead. However baking in animation does minimize the overhead anyway, so in the end it is not a HUGE deal to remove the underlying rig. I was just wondering if it was something feasible.

However with a little more playing around I am sure I will get the setup to work as I want it to. Loving it so far.

Regards;

Steve

That's interesting, sounds like it has a great tie-in with Maya for workflow. I can understand why you would want something more stripped down in that case. Originally when I wrote this script, it wasn't designed with games in mind, but I received a lot of requests for it, so it was kind of an afterthought.

Game engines are a huge can of worms, because there are so many out there that require a unique workflow. So doing something that works really great for one game engine, may not counter intuitive for another.

It's definitely something I will keep in mind though, for future updates :)

-Dustin