Maya Referencing

I've spent the last month or so updating our Referencing Pipeline in Maya and thought I'd share a few tips in light of changes in Maya 2011. This will probably be a multi-part post... too much for one.

Part1: Background and Workflows - Reference crash course

At work we run a fully referenced animation setup, carefully managed by custom character checkers, loaders and asset management systems all designed to by-pass bugs and limitations in Maya native referencing setups.

Where to begin.... How and what should you reference?

Firstly referencing is designed to make life easier, a change in a source file will automatically ripple into all your working files. So in the case of Character Rigs ideally you'd want to reference the modelGeo into a skin file, skin it, reference that into a rig file, rig it, reference that into an animation and animate it. GREAT, you change the mesh and ......BOOOOOOOM! oops wait all my animations broken.. WTF?. In the real world there are just too many unknowns and possible conflicts to go that far. Also you really want to isolate certain changes from stages of production. So point one:

Avoid nesting your references if you can.

We run a 2 stage reference setup, based around a Rig that carries the skinned master character around with it... basically the output skeleton and geo piggy-back the rig's internal skeleton. This means that the riggers can run rig files that have a reference to the characters skin file - a scene with the skeleton and geo skinned, basically the output file required for the game. What this means is that to generate a new animation rig all that's required is to open up the master rig file, switch the reference to the skin file to the new character and bingo, rig done. This is very fast and ensures consistency in the rig itself. The piggy backing also isolates any small changes in skeleton, making it possible to tweak the characters internal structure if really required without destroying all your animation files. This referenced rig is itself then referenced into a second level where the facial is added.

Now that gives you a working rig, and for a short period we used these files for animation. But referencing is based on macros, referenceEdits, and they're just not stable enough to cope with this level of complexity, it means production gets flaky and that comes back to you, the TD. So before passing the files to the animators dereference it. flatten those references out of the file isolating them from rig production.

Referencing the Rig - Naming conventions:
So now we have a production ready rig, no references in it, and most crucially, all nodes NAMED IDENTICALLY in all rigs.. or at least all the master controllers the animators will touch are all named generically. Why not name the rig nodes to match the characters, why not prefix things in the rig file eg BOND_Wrist_Ctr? You need to understand the way referencing is managed internally. Think of it like this, referencing just imports a scene and runs a macro on it which is NAME DEPENDENT, that's crucial and there are ways to by-pass it, we'll get to those later. So in the case above if you'd animated Bond_Wrist_Ctr and then switched reference to Odjob who's rig file had Odjob_Wrist_Ctr nothing would connect up and you'd be left with a broken scene... not good.

Namespaces:
These are the devils work, but required to make referencing in Maya work. The idea is that the generic rig has everything none specifically named, then when you make the reference you use namespaces to denote who the character is. So you'd end up with BOND:Wrist_Ctr. This is a crucial distinction to prefixing. Namespaces are handled by the reference command/file command, when you switch the reference to a rig all you're doing is pointing it to a new file, replacing the imported file nodes and then rerunning that refEdit macro. The namespace will remain as it was after the switch, but that's easily changed from inside the reference editor itself.

I'll explain the tech side of namespace management in the next part..