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

[ernstAlert]

@Efrye;216076

And while I’m here, a few questions of my own:

1. I create my animations in Maya with 60 FPS and would like to export them with 60 FPS. However, when I choose the 60 FPS setting in the “Export Motion” window, the exporter uses double of what I set as frame range.

For example: I have an animation that’s 40 frames long at 60 FPS. When I export it with the frame range set to “0 to 39” and FPS set to 60, it exports 0 to 78 instead. When I set it to 30 FPS, the exporter sets the timeline to 19.5 but seems to export the whole animation with a key on every other frame. So I end up with an animation that’s once again 78 frames long but only has 39 keyframes.

The workaround I’m currently using is setting the frame range to half of what I want to export and then use the 60 FPS option, but that means I can’t use odd numbers. Am I doing something wrong or is it a bug in the exporter?

2. For some reason I can’t use most of the animation tool features anymore like the IK/FK switches, the pose editor, reset rig to default, et cetera. I’m getting the following error:
# Error: ValueError: file C:/Google Drive/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_animationUI.py line 6317: No object matches name: :ik_upperarm_fk_matcher_l #
or
*# Error: RuntimeError: file C:/Google Drive/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_animationUI.py line 5124: setAttr: No object matches name: :Rig_Settings.lFkArmOrient # *

I’m also getting cycle warnings when I try to change the arms’ orientation space and the settings don’t seem to have any effect:
*# Warning: Cycle on ‘fk_orient_world_loc_l_parentConstraint1.target[0].targetRotate’ may not evaluate as expected. (Use ‘cycleCheck -e off’ to disable this warning.) # *

I recently had to format my PC and reinstall Maya, but even with a clean installation and the latest toolset from your dropbox, the problem persists.

3. The exporter doesn’t allow me to select weapons. According to the documentation they should show up in the dropdown list as long as they have a namespace, which they do.

4. Even with those issues your tools already saved me a huge amount of time, so thanks a lot for all your work!

Definitely sounds like a feature that rotted with time. I’ll look into that 60fps issue asap. What it was supposed to do was double your frame range and bake a key on every frame, then export at 60fps. We found internally that only exporting at 60fps while having your timeline set to 30 meant the engine was doing a lot of interpolation for the animation that wasn’t wanted. I’ll write myself a note to look into this. sorry about that.

The second issue just sounds like the rig needs to be rebuilt with the latest code. Sounds like you’re animating on a rig that’s probably 6+ months old, or at least from code that is that old. There were improvements made to matching that called for some changes and that’s where that error is coming from. Do you have access to the export file to be able to rebuild?

The 3rd issue is likely because the weapons aren’t in the project folder, which was something that came after the docs were written (really should update those!)
I made this video for another person on the forums that covered this (I was troubleshooting in the video, so pardon that):
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/10939513/WeaponAnimExport.wmv

Also, thank you I’m glad it’s helping you out. Hopefully we can sort those issues out and have it work 100% for you!