Non linear Animation Test

I was hoping to have finished final rig (for now at least) and subsequently right a post on the different rigging I've been working with, however the rig is in a nearly there state of a completion I'm just ironing out problems and building the right arm. However I wanted to test out a method of animation that I had planned for us to use on the game project to create nice easily to access character animation sheets. The theory being that all the animations for each character would be created and put into one easy to access maya file or converted into fbx for a straight import to the game engine. Seemingly the best way to do this would be to use something called the trax editor in maya, and a combination of character sets, poses/animation and trax. Essentially what this process required was for us to select the characters rig and whatever the key frames where being assigned to, in our case a series of nurbs curve based controllers. Then we make a character set for that character, for instance "clip" our main protagonist. Then we animate the piece of animation we want to do next. Animation for games is a bit strange as all the animations are created seperately, but need to make sure they will seemlessly integrate with one another, for instance you will create a walk cycle, a jump on the spot and a jump while the character is moving (everyone whos played games knows you can jump a ridiculously longer distance if you were moving to begin with). But I have gone off point, this means that in a lot of ways it makes sense to make different maya files but the programmers want one file with all the different animations for each character, a problem to overcome. And it turned out to be simple, the trax editor in maya, by saving out pieces of animation for each character set as a clip (a special animation file, it gets confusing explaining whilst talking about a main character also called clip) you can then import all the clips into one scene, and move the animations around. re-order, scale etc the animation as an entire clip rather than its individual keyframe, its like editing lots of clips of video together, this scene can then be saved for the prgrammers to open in the engine and code that when the player presses forward the character will move and the animations between frames 1 and 24 of the walk cycle will be cyled, magic. This video is of a walk cycle made for clip the main character, which I created a character set for, saved the walk animation as a clip and then experimented with duplicating to increase duration, and scaling the length of the clip to slow and speed up the walk.

Untitled from Toby Rutter on Vimeo.