Rig component

I created a Maya skirt rig with fake collision and fake gravity used for the player character in the game Toca Days.

Skirt rig showcase

We originally used an in-engine code-based skirt, but it left a lot to be desired in many animation states. With the animation style used in the project (lots of extreme poses where a leg or arm might easily clip through the skirt), we knew the only good solution in many cases would be to hand-animate the skirt, and possibly blend between the in-engine rig and handmade animation.

To test the viability of the hand-animated approach I set up a skirt rig and animated the skirt in some base locomotion (idle, walking, running, and jump states) to get an idea of if the hand-animated solution could work

Since the results were a huge improvement, and was overall pretty easy to animate, we opted to use only the hand-keyed approach. After improving the skirt rig I ended up tweaking and re-exporting all player animation (at the time 300+ .fbx files!) in a little over a day. Many animations looked fine with the automatic animation, most needed a few minutes to tweak, and a few animations with more extreme poses (the ones that handled the previous setup the worst!) needed upwards of 40 minutes of work.

One of the biggest improvements was the sitting-down "emote", which went from "pretty awful" to "good enough to stop worrying"