I have several art assets that I have already rigged, skinned, and animated.

Unfortunately, the objects have to be re-sized.

There isn’t a simple way to simply scale the rigg to match the new size, because then the transforms are incorrect, and the scale on the bones are no longer at 100%.  Normally it wouldn’t matter, but these objects need to go into a game engine, so it has to be at 100%

No, simply re-sizing the rigg and hoping to just ‘reset scale’ will not work either. 

Save/Load animation will inherit the pivot points of the original animation and paste them onto the re-sized objects, so that does not work either.

Is there a way to transfer a rigg and save it’s animation when an object gets re-sized?  I’d figure that Autodesk would have made some kind of feature for this sceanrio, since in game production things will inevitably be scaled at some point.

Thanks for any help!

edit: 
It’s easy to scale everything to it’s new size… the problem is… how do I reset it’s transforms without the rigg going bonkers?

How do I take the original animations and re-apply them to the newly scaled down version?

Thanks again for your time and help.

There is no easy way to scale it and not have a scaled matrix. You will have to re-rig. You can save the animation as there is a retake getting system built into the Save/Load Animation tool and it does work. Learning to use it can be difficult that is for sure but you can set scaling values. All controllers will have to be identical and all orientations as well so be very careful when setting up the new rigs.

Simple solution is to never do what you have done especially when it has to go into an engine.

Another possible solution is to build an FK only rig and bake over the rotations only and save load the positions with a rescale or scale to animation to then bake it over.

Paul Neale
PEN Productions Inc.
penproductions.ca / paulneale.com
Master Classes for Max, Mudbox and Composite
DotNet Tutorials

MX Driver Car and Trailer Rig On Sale!

Thanks for the response Pen

I tried your suggestion and got kinda close with baking the FK rotations, but it always would inherit some scale off-set and would distort the size in a subtle way.  I spent quite of bit of time learning how the animation mapping works, and got a much better understanding but still found it to be unable to simply load the rotations of corresponding bones from one animation to another of a differently sized riggs. 

I decided to just re-rigg and re-animate the assets from scratch.

I hope Autodesk creates some features to deal with this issue, because I’d imagine that it would be pretty common problem for animators in the game industry.  The mapping interface needs to be more streamlined, simplified, and saving/loading animations from differently sized riggs should not have to be a major problem.

I’m also curious to know if you plan to release an Advanced Rigging DVD set?  I bought your Intermediate Rigging set and learned tons of valuable, useful information from it.  Thanks for sharing the knowledge it was definately money well spent! :D

No more DVD’s planne especially through CGA as he refuses to pay the creators of the DVD’s for at least the last couple years.

DVD’s are also so easily pirated, mine have been on you tube for many years. I’m most likely to just be doing master classes and I might do some downloadable content at some point but I don’t know when.

Paul Neale
PEN Productions Inc.
penproductions.ca / paulneale.com
Master Classes for Max, Mudbox and Composite
DotNet Tutorials

MX Driver Car and Trailer Rig On Sale!