Hi there,
Let's say I made a pretty smooth animation with a monkey head logo. But hey, marketing decided to change it to a dinossaur head logo instead.
Is there a way to perhaps swap the object so it inherits position, orientation, and keyframes all at once? Maybe somehow to replace it entirely on the outliner?
I know how to copy all of those one by one, but if there's a way to make it faster, that would be awesome!
Changing things after the fact is always a pain, I don't think there is a one click easy solution. If you work from the start thinking of the possibility of changes in the future, you can take a few steps to mitigate the pain. Like not animating on the object itself, using empties parented to the object, that way you can change the object and all the animation data lives in the empty, so the object really doesn't matter. You can always play around with swapping object data, but if there's an armature with weights on the vertices, that's a pain. Most of the time stuff will need tweaking. And it's even worst when there's UV's and texture painted already that depends on those UV placement and then they require a change, it's painting all over again. So approval from marketing should be no joke, the re-work when doing stuff in 3D is too much.
Yeah, I hear you. Oh well, it was worth the shot. Thanks Omar!
Generally speaking the only thing you need to transfer is the animation. This can be done by appending/linking the monkey logo animation to the dino logo's file. Then through action editor(dopesheet editor in actions mode) select the monkey logo animation from animation drop down. This is the icon to the left of the new button or an action name if you've start animating already. Another option is If everything is associated with the mesh object then you can add the dino logo to monkey logo's file and on the monkey logo goto data tab and change the mesh data to the dino logo's mesh data.
If the animation is associated with an armature then you just need to parent and weight the armature to the dino logo. Depending on how different the logos are you may be able to use a weight transfer modifier. Sorry I don't have a lot of experience with this modifier. I believe Wayne goes over it in the new rig course.
Nice! More cool tricks to try! Thanks for the detailed insight Dwayne!