How To Duplicate Characters

Maya
1

I have followed various tut's and successfully rigged three characters within my scene. Each character has foot/hand rolls, forearm expressions, ikhandles, clusters and various controls to move various parts etc.

My problem is that one of my characters is a grave digger and I need four identical gravediggers. I have tried duplicating and messing around with settings in 'duplicate special' but it only seems to duplicate my 'global control' curve. I check "duplicate input graph" and "assign unique name to child nodes" as I was advised this would duplicate the full rig as I described at the start of this post.

However, the only thing that seems to duplicate is my global control. Am I doing something wrong or is there an easier way to duplicate my gravedigger? I need all four in the same scene. Any help greatly appreciated!

2

just have gravedigger character in a separate file, then import that four times into an empty scene.

3

hey uiron, thanks for taking time to reply.

The file I have at the moment has full environment etc, so if I do a 'save as' and delete everything but the gravedigger character, then do a 'file', 'import'', select my separate gravedigger file, this wil bring in my gravedigger?

Sorry if this is simple stuff but I am pretty new to Maya! Thanks

4

Yeah just tried it and it worked a treat! Thanks for the advice it has saved me a lot of time..

5

Hey dude, i used to do what you've done there many times before somebody told me the following advice, this will save you a lot of time and complications!

Instead of having to delete all the stuff you don't want in a scene and then doing 'save as' (which could take forever in a big scene aside from keeping unwanted connections etc), you can simply select the things you DO want all together and go to file>export selection. This means you can instantly get bits and bobs saved as seperate files and import them between as much as you like with no hassle.

Maybe next time when you make the characters it might be worth doing in seperate files as especially when rigging this could get messy with joint heirarchies etc! Hope that helps,

Tom

6

Hey fuzquia,
yes we've all been there. I think punkjunkie is right. Exporting does a great job of keeping only what you want, if you have "include history" checked.
But the most important thing is indeed to build everything separately. It will save you ages in the future. For each character, have one file. then import.

if you're doing to do this a lot in the future, another tip: importing multitple characters creates multiple shading groups. You can use "remove duplicate shading networks", either on import (there's a checkbox) or afterwards (in the hypershade).

However for some reason, this doesn't always work and can be rather slow.

The best solution I've heard (thank u gmask) is to import a version of your character that has no shaders, just shading groups, and then reconnect them by name. This can be scripted obviously:
(this is a real crappy script so anyone who wants to revise it be my guest, it was done at 3am in a real rush) (TECH DEBT!)

CODE
// reconnect ShadingGroups by name.

string $allSG[] = {};
string $SG;
string $M;

$allSG = ls -type shadingEngine;
for ($SG in $allSG)
{
    $M = substitute "SG" $M "";   // find material. shading groups have to be named right. e.g. Blinn1 --> Blinn1SG
    $M = substitute "SG[0-9]" $SG ""; // just in case there are things like Blinn1SG1
    $M = substitute "IMP\_" $M "";       // just in case there are things like IMP_Blinn1SG (if you imported with "IMP_" string
    catch (connectAttr -f ($M + ".outColor") ($SG + ".surfaceShader"));
}