5518 - Horserider Animation Exporter

While working with 5518 Studios I've had a chance of working on many interesting and challenging projects, ones that challenged both the creative and technical side of things.

One such game project involved creating dozens and dozens of animations of a horse and a rider. Animations had to play in sync, and the rider had to be attached to a horse, and it required a special approach to exporting it - the rider's root joint had to be zeroed out (it's animation removed and placed at world origin).

Since we were tasked with delivering animations as Maya scene files, I prepared an animation exporter script to go along with animations to help our client with exporting these animations into a game engine.

One of the key features of this exporter script was that it used FBX SDK to edit the exported FBX file - removing namespaces, removing animations on the root joint of the rider, and cleaning everything up to produce lightweight FBX files that only contained animation data and no other unnecessary information. This resulted in a non-destructive and fast animation export, that did not make any changes into Maya scene, since all changes were applied directly to the exported FBX file.