Details:
The Clean Skeleton Exporter was created to clean up messy joint hierarchies on export. It’s an animation and skeletal mesh fbx exporter that adds/updates root bones, culls non-joint nodes within the hierarchy itself, and bypasses non-influenced joints. It does this all on a separate joint hierarchy so that it’s non-destructive. Here’s a quick step-by-step process of what’s going on from the backend:
- Create a temporary namespace for all new assets created
- Add a new joint called ‘root’ and position it at Maya origin (0, 0, 0) if it’s not already there
- Duplicate every joint in the original joint hierarchy
- Copy over the joint orientation values from the original joint hierarchy to the new one
- Query the parents of all the original joints and reparent the duplicated joints together in the same way to form a clean joint hierarchy
- Skeletal Mesh Exports:
- – Duplicate any meshes that have skin influences from the original joint hierarchy
- – Copy the skin weights from the original meshes to the duplicated ones
- – Export both the duplicated meshes and the clean joint hierarchy
- Animation Exports:
- – Constrain the clean joints to the original joints
- – Bake the clean joints
- – Export the clean joints
