How to copy animations to a rig with different bones?

Question

I've been creating small animations with a certain model for a while now but recently someone was nice enough to redo the rig and make it better. It's the same model with mostly the same weights and such except with more control bones and different names for the original bones.

I heard it was possible to copy animations from one rig to another if they had the same bones, my new rig is different from the original but is there still a way to copy animations from my old rig to the new one, any way at all?

Answer 1

If you select multiple bones' animation keyframes and copy/paste them, they will be assigned on the basis of shared name. That makes it so that the easiest thing to do is to rename the bones in one of the armatures to be the same as corresponding bones in the other armature. (Note also that bone rotation mode matters here-- there are separate channels for Euler and quaternion keyframes, so make sure that corresponding bones also use the same rotation mode.)

If you don't want to do that, Blender will also copy/paste keyframes from dissimilarly named bones, provided that you have copied only a single bone's keyframes.

When you paste keyframes in the f-curve editor, make sure that you're at frame one and that the bone into which you're pasting contains at least one keyframe.

Answer 2

Delete the bones from the model you want to duplicate your animated bones to. Then copy and paste the bones from the original armature and move it into the model. Then do the ctrl p and combine the two. After that if you play the animation you will see if it rotates that the rotation is much more major the farther away it is from the original armature not only will you need to delete the rotation but also the position. For it will move exactly in the spot of the original armature. The only thing that would work is scale keyframes. The others would simply not work when copied. The only possible way I believe is if you could re-calculate the x and y position to make it from go to x 30 to + 30 x. If that makes sense.