For animation, translating from a traditional animated film to 3D was a task in itself.  There are many moments in the film, especially the umbrella section, where Totoro’s arms become much longer.  It was especially apparent when Totoro wasn’t able to hold the umbrella in front of his body.  I had originally addressed this with stretchy IK arms in the rig, but I learned quickly that Maya’s scale compensate for joints is not recognized by Unity and that forced me to throw that out leaving me with no other choice than to perform multiple animation tricks to try and make it work as best as possible.  

The facial animation on Totoro and Catbus was achieved with blend shapes along with joints driving the eyelids and lips.  This allowed for us to achieve the extreme poses on Totoro’s mouth.  Once the rig was complete we ran into an issue where the rig was suddenly too complicated to send to Unity and required an alternative method through the form of a “puppet rig”.  This is where Brave Rabbit’s actor tool came in handy (http://www.braverabbit.de/v2/).  This allowed me to have a complicated animation rig in Maya and a more simple actor rig made up of joints, Totoro’s mesh, and his blend shapes.  The actor joints were parented to their respective anim rig joints making it simple as baking the animation to the actor joints and the blend shapes then exporting the actor rig and it’s animation to Unity.  We then ran into an issue with FBX where our blend shape animation wasn’t coming through to Unity.  After scouring the internet we found that blend shapes only seemed to work using the 2010 Maya Binary file format.  Once we got all of these problems solved, the rest of the project ran smoothly.