Quick Primer to Importing Animations

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Creating Animation Rigs:

If you want to animate using a custom rig it's recommended that you use an existing MHW Skeleton as a reference for bone position and structure. To export correctly animations need to be transferred back to a MHW Skeleton (Animation Armature in import settings), to accomplish this the rig must store information about the bones that correspond on the MHW Skeleton.

There's three ways of doing this:

1. Name the bones in the rig after bones in the MHW Skeleton. When transferring back remember to check "Transfer by Name"
2. Add a custom property "boneFunction" to each of your rig's bones with the bone function of the corresponding bone on the MHW Skeleton.
3. Use the BoneFunction.XXX syntax to set a bone's bone function. When transferring back remember to check "CAT Rig".

Option 1 is the simplest if you are transferring an animation from a different game which also has it's own skeleton. Simply rename the bones on your rig to match the closest bone in the MHW Skeleton.

Option 2 is ideal if you are developing a rig for use by others. It ensures that you can have descriptive names on your rig while still keeping a link to the MHW Skeleton. This is used by Statyk's Rigs, using his premade rigs requires no work on the way back, they already have the required properties to map your animations to the base MHW Skeleton. If you make an animation rig for new situations not already covered in the Mod3Toolbox feel free to contact *&#7932 on Discord for their inclusion on the toolbox.

Option 3 is ideal when creating an animation rig in foreign software from a MHW Skeleton. In particular it's designed for CAT Rigs which can be generated from existing skeletons while keeping the names of the original bones. In this case ensure that the MHW Skeleton bone names are the default ones on import as it will extract the bone function from the bone name.

Transferring Back

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Once you have finished animating in your main rig, you can use the transfer tools to transfer the animation data back to a MHW Skeleton. Make sure the skeletons more or less line up before performing the transfer.

As noted before, transferring normally operates on the custom property "boneFunction", to override this either Transfer by Name, or use the CAT Rig transfer (which extracts bone function information from the bone names).

If you wish to preview how the animation will look on the MHW Skeleton disable baking. Disabling baking makes the transfer tool stop after setting the bone constraints on the MHW Skeleton and before baking and removing said constraints. This enables checking if there's missing bones or issues with the matching between rigs.

Baking will keep the original animation untouched, and creates a copy and assigns it to the MHW Skeleton. Setting the Root as Ground Level ensures the animation matches MHW expecctation of the Root being the ground level reference, disable at your own risk.

Specifying a rig type let's the transfer tool suggest default settings for certain Platform Targets. It's recommended to leave it as it is for the Humanoid Rig and manually fill in the bone function for the limbs for monster rigs. A generic rig option is provided with more freedom over the Platform Bone Functions.

If your skeleton has explicit bones set up for the platforms this will always override the settings in the panel.

Platform Targets are guides used by the IK system to determine where the ground is relative to the character's IK end points. For limbs they are used to track objects attached to the character's grasp. The neck platforms are more obscure, they only track the position of specific neck bones, and it's not clear what they are for.

It's recommended to leave the default tracking settings as they are unless you know what you are doing.

At the end of the transfer process (with bake enabled) you should have a FreeHK Compatible action, and you should be able to plug it into any LMT Action node on the FreeHK Node Editor.