A miracle

After battling between adobe fuse and audodesk character creation and feeling like i'd settled with something with less quality just for ease of use I discovered a miracle! There is a third party script for Maya which completely rigs adobe fuse characters in a very user friendly way. All one has to do is import the .fbx file of your character and run the script:

Then you are prompted with this window. You simply click on the 'rig character' button and it starts to calculate the algorithms that are needed with your specific character.

All the handles are created as well which gets rid of the need to go burrying into human IK. But what is even better is that it rigs the face as well

Which is a much more user friendly and efficient way of doing facial animations as apposed to blend shapes.

After animating the news reporter scene using an autodesk character and having quite a frustrating time due to the very meticulous way of setting keys and using human IK and the blend shapes window for the facial animations. I began a search for ways of using purely the adobe fuse characters in a more efficient way. this would also cut out the need to wrap different characters in clothes from the fuse characters. Miraculously I found this script which made my life so much more easier.

The only issue is that you need an adobe account to be able to use fuse and export fbx files as opposed to autodesk character generator which is free. It just meant I had to travel down to Birmingham to talk to Datomec to see if I could use their adobe account to create these characters.

I think there is definitely a big future for this kind of character creator. especially due to the quality of these characters. If I was to learn how to create these characters from scratch and rig them properly to the same level of professionalism I would need another 2 years ... this is not possible obviously. But this also applies to the CGI world for example if a studio had limited funds, an adobe fuse character would be a lot cheaper than to hire a character mesh creator, a character texture and UV skinner and rigger. It would also save tones of time. this is why I think this method has a big future. especially with its increasing professionalism and complexity.