Ingo Clemens (The Brave Rabbit) shows some of the problems encountered when trying to export a custom rig from Maya to a game engine such as Unity 3D, and demonstrates how to get around them, and also offers some Maya Scripts to ease the process. Check out the post for Export a Custom Rig With Animation from Maya to Unity here.
Ingo Clemens Writes: This tutorial is about how to transfer a custom rig including animation from Autodesk Maya to a game engine such as unity. The main problem for this process is that most of what makes up a character rig, such as controls, constraints, connections, expressions will not always get properly imported into the game engine. One way to get around this is to build a rig that includes only the features that can be read by the game engine, which are usually joints and maybe ik controllers. The downside of using such a limited rig for animation is that the animation process itself becomes a real pain because all the nice controls that can make animating a breeze are missing.
