Hey! I definitely didn’t delete anything!
Yeah, so ARTv1 gets stretched to the limits once you go passed bipeds with extras. It can do quadrupeds by just turning the biped and using the arms as legs. Once you get into wing territory and beyond, it is possible, but only if you’re rigging and scripting are really, really good. We do use ART on Paragon, which has some crazy characters, and anything custom is done using the leaf and chain modules and a lot of scripting in the post-script.ARTv2 aims to fix this by going modular.
However, the reason we often choose not to do a custom rig on something crazy and instead script a bunch of custom work in a post-script and use ART is because it fits into the pipeline nicely. Custom rigs means no animation picker, no tools, no exporter, etc. It often will take us 1-3 days, depending on how crazy the thing we’re trying to rig is, to add the custom post-script.
For example, Muriel, Howitzer, and Gadget show lots of custom things we had to add in script for Paragon characters. Muriel has wings, Howitzer is actually a character riding in a mech (all done in ART), and Gadget has a third arm.