Animation and Rigging Toolkit

Hey guys, i am sad :frowning:

Before my subscription i looked at the Youtube tutorials and saw this amazing A&R Toolkit. Thought it is a feature of the UE4 subscription. Now after creating my level and dreaming of my own game i realize that the ART (cause only 4 the expensive Maya) isnt effordeable. Maya License is out of my range as hobby developer.

Can someone tell me an alternative?

Would you pleass mark the ART tutorials as “only working with Maya”?! (Pros might see this as the tutorial is done in maya, but Noobs like me dont realize this)

There’s a free student version of Maya that the ART tools WILL work with, you could try that. You have to sign up to the students.autodesk.com website (just say you’re home-schooling yourself, I don’t think they really check), download the student version and use that.

The only two catches with the student version is:

The license is time-locked to expire after 3 years from initial activation.

You can’t ‘legally’ use any assets you create with the student version in a project you plan to release commercially.

Autodesk HAVE released a scaled down version of Maya aimed at indie developers, it’s about 1/4 the price of full maya, and it’s called Maya LT, but at the moment, it’s missing a few key things that limit it, such as Python support (so the ART tools won’t work), and there’s no GoZ support, hopefully, these issues will be addressed soon.

So right now, your best option if you want to use the ART tools, is the student license.

I think that if A.R.T. would have been integrated dirrectly in Unreal Editor, there won’t be the need to pay for thousands of dollars softwares to use it commercially. I suggest you to add rigging and animation tools dirrectly inside the Unreal Editor. In that case, anyone with a decent modelling tool could import their mesh and rig it in there. For some users, in the current state, ART is unreachable, because of its single-high cost-software availability.

Agreed on the point about integration, though there is the option of Maya LT, which is about 1/4 the price of full maya (ÂŁ700/$795), aimed at Indie game devs, and it CAN be used for commercial projects.

The only reason i didn’t mention it in my first post is, at the moment, it only supports MEL scripting, not Python, with the ART tools are written in, and need.

As an alternative to ART, the closest plugin I could think is Rigify for Blender.

 There was also a discussion about an A.R.T. plugin for Blender here: http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?332923-Unreal-Engine-4-A-R-T-plugin-for-Blender/page2 . 

 For Blender-UE4 export part, you could take a look at this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&persist_app=1&v=NkJPfGEcrrA

Thank you guys :slight_smile: