Model Animations in Maya and UDK

Right, showing the actual result I mentioned in my earlier post, "Model Animations _ stretching problem and solution", took a little longer then anticipated. This was due to some other work I had to do and things I wanted to test out with the blends and animations in Maya as well.

Here below is a video of the animation on the block-out character in Maya. This video shows what the transformation animation should look like. The transformation is from Human form to Bipedal werewolf form.

In Maya the animation fluid, the reason for this is because I re-applied the blendshape on the human form and set keys for the blendshape in the animation bar.

Unfortunately I cannot export the models with this method in the .FBX export. Why? Because the export does not allow the set up of applying a blendshape after the model has been skinned to the rig. For some reason it exports both the human and bipedal rig but only the bipedal model, even when you want to export the human model and rig.

So for UDK I held the set-up of the idea I mentioned in my previous post. Which was:
Play the animation on the Human form model and rig -> Swap to the Human form model in pose and apply the morph -> Swap the morphed human model in pose to the Bipedal werewolf form model -> Play the animation on the Bipedal werewolf form model and rig. Which results in the video shown below.

As you can see the animation is not as fluid as in Maya, this is mainly because of the simple rig structure and simple skinning I applied on the model. With more practice and greater detail this is problem that should be resolved.

For the upcoming weekend I hope to finally finish writing out the pipeline and explain the structure and set-up of the matinee sequence in Kismet,UDK in greater detail.