Scene Preparation
If you are having troubles with making a functional rig for your character, please check this page.
It lists all requirements that are necessary for properly rigging a character in Cascadeur.
General
1. The scene should include a character skeleton, i.e. a set of Joints - to which Cascadeur rig could be applied.
2. If there is a character mesh (or several meshes), it should be skinned to the skeleton, i.e. they should move when the Joints are moved.
3. The character model’s size in the scene should roughly match its ‘presumed’ size (e.g. an elephant should be 3-4 meters tall). If it is either too big (dozens of meters) or too small (20 centimeters or less), you may encounter problems while rigging it.
Also, AutoPhysics may not work properly with characters of such extreme sizes.
Root and Root Object
4. Some characters have root objects at the top of their hierarchy, represented as Transform objects. These are either automatically added by the software after the model has been exported (Blender’s Armature, Unreal’s scene space object) or included in the original control rig by the rigger (Maya’s Groups).
If the character’s size is off, you can try changing the root object's scale to better match their correct size.
5. If you plan to export the character to some other software, the scale for the root or the root object should be equal to 1 for all three axes:
Note:
Scaling the character in Cascadeur is not recommended if you’ll later be sending the animation to a game engine (Unreal, Unity, etc.), as it will most likely break the imported animation.
If you experience problems with the model’s scale and plan to send it into a game engine, it’s better to solve these problems in the software from which the model originated (Blender, Maya, etc.) by changing and baking the model’s scale.
6. If you plan to create animations for a character that will be used in a game engine (Unreal, Unity, etc.), the best way to increase compatibility with Cascadeur would be to:
• Import the character into the software.
• There, export it.
• Import this exported character to Cascadeur.
Skeleton
7. The skeleton should be in the default pose - such as A-pose or T-pose - at least on frame 0:
Left: T-pose; Right: A-pose.
8. The skeleton should be positioned at the right angle (90 degrees) to the ground level:
9. The pose should be completely symmetrical:
Isometric Grid can be useful in determining if the pose is symmetrical.
10. The character’s ‘line of sight’ should be parallel to one of the coordinate axes (for example, default Cascadeur models are aligned along the +Z axis):
An example of a character correctly oriented along the +Z axis.
Individual Joints
11. Joint names should include parts that designate the mirroring side, such as _L/_R, .l/.r or something similar.
12. The mirroring parts in the joint names should be consistent across all joints (e.g., the mirrored joints all have the same _L/_R suffixes; the mirroring parts don’t suddenly change to .l/.r, l_/r_ etc. in some joints).
Note
If your model has differently named affixes and you absolutely can’t rename the bones, you can write down the extra mirroring parts in the 'Additional affixes' field in the Mirror tab inside the Scene Settings.
13. Joint names should not include unnecessary garbage symbols (i.e. names like thigh_l_0250, r_lowerarm_end_end etc.).
14. Feet should be placed right on the ground, not above or below it:
Quick Rigging Tool
15. Quick Rigging Tool recognizes a number of standard skeletons (from Unreal, Daz, Character Creator, etc.)
If QRT didn’t recognize your model’s skeleton, you can fill out the body part slots with the corresponding joints.
16. AutoPosing requires all controllers (except for weapon controllers) listed in the Quick Rigging Tool to work; if some are missing, Cascadeur won’t be able to generate the AutoPosing rig.
The same goes for Finger AutoPosing - all 3 slots in each of the 5 fingers must be filled out for the Finger AutoPosing to be generated.