Animation Ready Rigged Human model using MakeHuman and Maya within an hour

Hello everyone, 

I’m going to show, how we can design, rig 3d characters in quick steps instead of modeling it. These steps are very much helpful for a game developer with little or no modeling experience.  So, without wasting any more time, let’s get started quickly.-

Step 1:  Designing a character in MakeHuman:

MakeHuman is a character designer tool which is currently limited to designing only human characters of almost any kind; we can even design a small human baby. Its interface is simple, easy to understand. Using this tool we can get our required character model ready within few minutes.
So the initial step will be to get the software, and design a human model that suits your requirement, here we can only design human model.

After designing character, check with pose/animate menu section. In skeleton tab you have to select “Cmu mb” rig preset, this step make sure that a model can be used easily within Maya.

Ok, now you are ready to go, almost 80 percent of work is completed. Now be sure to pose that model like this in figure below. This is an important step, without this Maya will give you validation errors and you may need to pose manually in Maya.
•    To this select pose tab from Pose/Animate menu.
•    In tag filter, select rest poses and then
•    Select Tpose from right side list.

Ok now we are almost done with MakeHuman application, last step you need to do is export that model from MakeHuman application as FilmBox (.fbx) file format. Check the image  below, you will get to know how to do it.

Ok now lets import that fbx file in Maya Application.
 

Step 2:  Assigning Human IK to model in Maya:

Genuinely speaking, I’m complete noob in Maya, so I may not be able to cover the complete theoretical details. So to begin with this part lets first import the Fbx model to Maya. Here is what your model will look like in Maya.

Ok, its almost done, we have our completely rigged model ready in Maya, now we have to assign some Human IK so that model will be animation ready, to do this.
Select Animation from drop down below menu bar.

Then from top menus select  

Skeleton==>> Human IK.

You will see character controls dialog will appear on right side.
Now as we don't have to create skeleton, we will just define our skeleton.
From that dialog, click on “Skeleton” button in define section, now you see something like this-

 
Ok now the concentration part (last part), this process will take not more than 10 minutes believe me, and its very easy, because you may have studied biology during high schools.
First step in this task is to make our model transparent set X-Ray View with X-Ray joints, check the image below-

Now, double click on the bone near right shoulder in character controls dialog. And then click on the same bone of model in ViewPort. You may need to zoom to set the bones correctly. You see something like this-

Now continue the same process with all the bones until that red spot mark turns to green.

***Note:For shoulders, select the bones shown in the image below.

***Note:And for hips select the bones highlighted with red and purple ovals in the image below:

Ok, all set, there’s your model ready for animation. You can test animation with importing motion files from Maya visors or by rotating hands and legs whatever you want.
You can always modify the character here in Maya or blender if you want. Imagination is the limit.
We will cover character animation and importing those animated character in Unity/Godot later.
Check the image below.

That’s all for this session folks.
Thank you very much.

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