Before we go ahead and work on the character rig in Maya, I would like to go over some rules you can use for building any character skeleton that is meant to be used for CRYENGINE.
There are some rules when it comes to creating a deformation skeleton for a CRYENGINE character. That's why we like to keep our animation and deformation skeletons separate.
The deformation skeleton is what we will use for skinning the character and it is the one that we will export to the engine in the CHR format. Because this skeleton needs to follow certain rules, we use another skeleton for building the rig, which is the animation skeleton.
The animation skeleton will drive the deformation skeleton via constraints or direct connections. There are no rules for laying out your animation skeleton; you can have whatever hierarchy you prefer for your rig as long as you understand that the end result needs to be hooked to the deformation skeleton.
The following are the rules for the deformation skeleton:
- You need to create a parent joint for all the joints in the skeleton at the origin of your scene. We usually refer to that joint as the Root bone. Whether you are working in Maya with z up or y up, you need to have the Root bone z axis pointing up and y forward. So, double-check the joint orientation.
- No scaling is allowed. The export process will fail if you have any scale values on your joints. If you need to have squash and stretch set up, you can simply apply that to your animation skeleton and let it drive the translation values on the deformation skeleton.
- Using underscore in the beginning of the joint names excludes them and their children from the skeleton hierarchy in the engine. So, make sure you don't have any of the excluded joints in your skin cluster. Otherwise, it will break your skinning in the engine.