Thanks for the quick response a few notes added alongside a few other things we spotted.
1.) For the FK/IK switch issue, are you doing this while in the T-Pose? If so, I’ve seen the 180 flip happen. If it’s in a normal pose though, it should work fine.
Works fine if not in T pose issue will occur on arms, legs & spine if in T pose.
Would be desirable from an animators POV to have the offset between the pole vector and arm maintained rather than snap to the elbow, mainly so that the control is easily visible (not hidden inside the arm mesh) and also to maintain a clean visual ark/position between states.
Something else we noticed is if an arm for example is in FK mode, if the animator uses “Match FK rig to current IK pose” it causes the pose/wrist to partially match breaking the pose, also occurs if in IK mode and pressing “Match IK rig to current FK pose”. Its completely avoided if we always press the correct button which begs the question should the alternative option be greyed out? e.g grey out “Match FK rig to current IK pose” if the current frame is already in FK mode. Can cause some pretty horrible counter workflow issues if auto match is active.
Lastly can a control be added which specifically controls whether or not the arms and legs are keyed as FK/IK? There’s an attribute under rig settings however it makes the workflow a little slower if we want to copy/paste a pose to a different frame whilst also copying across the modes current state.
All of the above have workarounds, just some friendly suggestions
2.) Not sure if I’v ever tested using the aim mode after having the T-Pose being auto-created. That certainly wasn’t the intent anyway. If you were to turn off aim mode before hitting ‘save pose’, it should work i’d imagine. I think the issue right now is that save pose probably isn’t checking for aim mode, and thus doesn’t know to run that function to clean it up.
It’s rare that we want to adjust the T pose however if it is required using the aim feature seemed to be the cleanest and easiest method to re position the controllers e.g. legs with minimal counter movement.
3.) This makes sense. There is a part of the code that figures out what the scale factor should be when building the rig, so that the controls are appropriately sized for the character. This assumption is done in cm, because UE4 operates in cm. I believe a scale factor of 1 in the code is something like 180cm.
Changed default to cm which resolved all of those issues. Worth noting if you have a setting to auto set scenes to a different unit scale when creating new, during AnimRig generation the IK controls will be in undesirable locations due to the new scene reverting back to a different unit scale, changing the units during the initial setup isn’t enough.
4.) yep, have no idea how to even fix that, if it’s even fixable. Maya cmds module gives no control on tab order. The new version being done in QT does.
No big deal
5.) I usually use the post-script section for this very thing. When publishing the character, you can slot in a post script that will scale all of your controls. If you’re not script savvy, simply copying the MEL output from the script editor and saving that out should work fine.
Thanks I had a feeling this would be the case. I’ll have a word with our TA. Do you have any useful premade post process scripts that can be bundled with ART?
6.) I did that intentionally, unless I’m not understanding the issue. It should still create the proxy geo, but it will be weighted to the hand.
Main reason was because our test character only had three fingers so the fourth pinky was always redundant, plus the proportions of the character were quite extreme so it stood out like a sore pinky.
I downloaded the latest dropbox version however I still get the same crash if files/projects is set to OS native with hide extensions on, no big deal as long as it’s off. Also is that link correct/up-to-date as it differs from the link on the first post?
Few new bits
Inconsistency between FK/IK mode between rig and rig settings:
Rig settings, interface doesn’t update when switching between FK/IK modes e.g switch legs to FK not using rig settings then open the rig setting tab afterwards it will still be set to IK.
Pose mirroring:
Arms and legs will mirror opposite however it doesn’t currently work with central controls such as hips, spine, neck, and head. Could this be supported as it would be hugely beneficial being able mirror/flip and entire pose e.g walk cycle stride.
Clavicle rotation:
Clavicle/Shoulder controls can be rotated however channel controls for rotation are hidden which makes it difficult to reset the controls position even if using set all to zero. Assume these can be re added through channel editor, just wondered if rotation could be locked if it’s not required.
Add/remove sequence button:
There’s an add sequence button within motion export however there’s no remove sequence button if amendments are required.
FBX motion export:
Using the Epic “ART” exporter has been failing to complete when attempting to save FBX files in the 2014 format at the end of the baking process.
By making a change in “ART_exportMotion.py” at line 766 & 849 with the code below, the process can now complete the FBX write process in 2014 and 2013 FBX file formats. The first line is the original code commented out, the lower line is the new command.
#cmds.file(fileName, es = True, force = True, prompt = False, type = "FBX export")
mel.eval('FBXExport -f "' + fileName + '" -s;')
Thanks,
Lead Animator
UK based studio