This project came with far more technical issues than I expected, and most of them were related to the rigs and the export workflow. The woman’s rig was the biggest challenge. Since it was a downloaded rig, I assumed it would be production-ready, but the deformation quality turned out to be extremely limited. The controllers were very small and often disappeared inside the mesh, so I constantly had to scale them up manually just to animate basic poses. The joint weighting was also unreliable; bending the elbows or knees even slightly caused the geometry to collapse. The facial rig had similar problems — trying to create expressions such as a smirk or a stronger eyebrow raise pushed parts of the face inside the mesh, which made expressive animation almost impossible.
Exporting this rig to Unreal Engine was another major problem. For three days straight, every FBX export attempt broke something. Either the animation wouldn’t import, the mesh came in without a skeleton, or multiple skeletons merged into one mesh. Sometimes the facial skeleton completely disappeared. None of the errors were consistent, which made troubleshooting slow and unpredictable.
The biggest setback came when Maya crashed during export and corrupted the files that contained the polished animation, including some backups. I had to reanimate most of the sequence — the body, the facial timing, and key emotional beats — with only seven days left. To keep up with the schedule, I animated on 5s and occasionally 10s, which affected the fluidity in some moments. Losing the files was a major learning moment; after that, I immediately bought an external hard drive and changed my entire backup workflow.
The mech rig had fewer issues since I built it myself, but it still came with challenges. Because the mech was made of many rigid parts, editing the hierarchy sometimes caused pieces to ungroup or lose their skin weights. Some parts froze while the rig moved, so I had to repeatedly rebind or clean up the skeleton. The waist joint was also stiff in certain motions because its rotation range wasn’t planned early enough. On the texturing side, combining meshes destroyed the UVs, so I had to re-UV and retexture the mech several times after rigging.
Cloth simulation for the woman’s suit also required multiple iterations. Even after disabling ground collision, the bodysuit occasionally floated or folded around her feet. I had to keep adjusting simulation settings to make the suit behave reliably, especially during rapid body movements.
Overall, these problems made the process extremely demanding, but they also shaped some of the most important learnings of the project. I learned how critical it is to evaluate rigs before committing to animation, how essential a proper file-backup system is, and why a clean, organised mesh hierarchy prevents major rig failures later. I also gained a much deeper understanding of export pipelines, UV discipline, simulation troubleshooting, and the importance of planning joints and pivots before rigging. Even though the issues slowed me down, they forced me to rebuild my workflow in a more professional way. By the end, the technical obstacles became just as valuable as the final animation.