Hi,

I have an animated character whose root is the upper chest, not the hips.
The characterization process works fine, but comes with warnings about the hierarchy.
(Spine is not direct descendent of hips, etc).

So the characterization has been working fine, as has driving some sample characters (mia, edward, dancer) with my character (or seemingly at least). Will I run into any problems with this kind of hierarchy?

Thanks,
qdin

If you can easily change it, I think you would be much better off just in case.  Solve the problem now before you spend hours animating.  However, if it is working fine as it, then maybe it is okay.  The only part that I think could be a problem is if you load motion created for another character.

I actually withheld a bit of info from my last post.
The ‘animated character’ is actually dynamically getting its data from an input device whose
character model’s root is the upper chest. Yes, I can theoretically change it, but I’d rather not if
I know motionbuilder characterization can handle it. And since this is a dynamic animation process, and not a single animation, I need to know that it will always work, and be as accurate as having the hips as the root.

I’ve been testing it for a while today, with good (visual) results, but I need to know from someone with good knowledge of internals of the characterization process whether this should or shouldn’t be a problem.

Some further information would be great: can anyone explain exactly what’s going on in the mapping from character to character? To what extent does it factor in rotation/translation? Or point me to somewhere that might explain this.

Thanks again.

the best way is to create two hierarchies off the chest joint.
ONE joint hiearchy that MOBU will like and then ONE off the chest joint that is not characterized in the control rig.

then you