Animation and Rigging Tools: FAQ, Known Issues and Feature Roadmap

[ernstAlert]

@PencilShavings;150252

I run maya 2011 on Linux (CentOS 6) for my personal use and have been running the maya 2014 trial on windows to play with your ToolKit.

I wanted to find out and see what it would take to get it working in maya 2011 (I read it was tested and works on 2012 witch is just my luck always being one version behind the requirements.) Here is what I came across, tested in maya 2011 on Linux (CentOS6) and Windows 7.

Upon installation the window pops up to locate the MayaTools dir and everything seems to work all fine and dandy, however the “Epic Games” menu does not appear and the script editor does not read any warnings or errors. I eventually got the “Epic Games” menu to pop up when I commented out:
scriptJobNum2 = cmds.scriptJob(event = “PostSceneRead”, autoOpenAnimUI]) in customMayaMenu.py
I created a mel “EpicGames Menu” so I could have access to the menu items via mel so i could add to a marking menu (and because the original wasn’t working). It gave some error about PostSceneRead so i commented it out and it and to my surprise it appeared.

The character creator opens up and you can play with the Skeleton Creation Settings. Everything seems to work fine.

As soon as you click on “Skeleton Placement” a warning pops up saying “Errors have occurred while reading this scene that may result in data loss. Please check the Script Editor for details.”
Nothing gets loaded and the UI does not change to Skeleton Placement UI.
Script editor: “# Error: KeyError: treeViewWidget” I attempted to debug the code and found several treeViewWidges in the ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.py, however there is a lot of code and I’m not much of a python guy. The scene not loading should be understandable due to backwards compatibility issues, especially with mb files.

The Edit Character window pops and seems to work but the Mannequin.mb is an unrecognized file and due to the Character creator not fully working I cant create and test my own. Same goes for the Add Character and Animation Interface. Again mostly due to backwards compatibility issues.

Settings and Help all seem to work just fine.

Haven’t had a chance to play with Perforce.

May/Could I put in a request further backwards compatibility with maya 2011? and possibly the option of using ma files? maybe have an option box of what you would like to use in the settings. Either in this current version or in your next iteration of Toolkit.

I was successful in saving out the Mannequin.mb as an ma out of maya2014. I changed the recommenced version from 2014 to 2010 and was able to open it in maya 2011 with no data loss. The rig works great with the exception of not having accesses to things like switching between ik/fk due to not being able to use the character control UI. Why did you choose not to have those accessible on the rig? If they are accessible where are they?

I’ll see what I can do with the next version. The biggest hurdle I see is the python version for 2011 is behind that of 2014+. So certain python commands may not work. I’m also not sure how many Maya commands have been added or changed that wouldn’t be cross-compatible. It always kills me that Autodesk removes commands from newer versions!

Btw, you can access switching by selecting the Rig_Settings node(should be pretty near the top of the hierarchy in the outliner). All of the settings are there for everything. Only thing that will suck is without the UI, you won’t get the match function.