Hi , testing some stuff yesterday after posting the question I figured out that the best solution is to integrate the facial rig after the rig is built, and looks like its working properly
Unfortunately in Maya the weighting management is a bit of a nightmare, so I ended up exporting everything to Softimage and integrate the facial rig from there, no errors found and inside UE4 its looking pretty good ( except for the silly facial animation )
With my little scripting knowledge I create a tool in Softimage which join together the skeletal rig and combine the meshes properly, so for now the workaround works fine
I am having an issue in Maya 2014 when I am using the ART. When I open up my scene I was working on, and then procedd to click on an item in the picker. I get an error saying Fatal Error. Attempting to save in C:/Users//AppData/Local/temp…2040819.1942.ma
I have tried updating my GPU drivers, clearing the temp folder, clearing maya history and not sure what else to do
It only happens when I use ART, everything else is fine. Anything you guys need please ust ask, really want to keep using the tool as I love it!
If I wanted to add physx cloth to my character, should I do it in the same “Rig file” that gets built or should I work on a copy of that file? what is the best worlflow?
Can you email me one of your pose text files you created? The only time anyone usually has IO errors is when they’re usually using someone else’s poses that have gone through perforce/github which changes the line endings and breaks it.
Hey there!
Sorry to hear that. No errors come up or anything? Have you tried downloading the scripts from the dropbox and overwriting the local ones you have?
These types of errors are the worst, as Maya provides zero useful feedback as to what actually happened.
For the matinee fight scene demo character, I actually did it in the Export file that gets created(Edit Existing Character->Edit Export File). That way if you need to rebuild the rig, your cloth work is still safe
I’m having trouble with Building the control rig. I get the “unknown nodes” error since I’ve been saving in ASCII. Do you have a work around for this? I’ve already gone through the trouble of resizing controls/joints and painting weights on my character’s mesh. Please tell me I don’t have to start all over again. Thanks in advance.
I haven’t worked on a particular project for a while during contruction of the rig up to and including the deformation setup.
Now whenever I open the work file it wont recognise that i’m at the deformation setup stage and start over at 1st stage, skeleton creation.
is there some way I can have it reload or recognise the fact that this is in fact a file that’s been worked on before? I don’t really want to start over from scratch as this particular project contains very complex skinning.
update #3 looks good, will it be compatible with older rigs, created or otherwise?
Hey there!
Sorry to hear that. This seems to pop up every once in a while, and it’s generally different reasons for different people. Some get this when importing a mesh from obj or fbx that brings in some junk. Other times it can come from trying to save the file as a different type than something in the scene came from. Fear not though! There are two options you can choose to get yourself straightened out.
Option 1:
If you’re likely running into the latter problem, this might be the best option for you. I wrote this quick script that should get you sorted:
attrs = cmds.listAttr("SkeletonSettings_Cache", ud = True)
values = ]
for attr in attrs:
value = cmds.getAttr("SkeletonSettings_Cache." + attr)
#attrType = cmds.getAttr("SkeletonSettings_Cache." + attr, type = True)
values.append(value)
cmds.delete("SkeletonSettings_Cache")
newNode = cmds.createNode("network", name = "SkeletonSettings_Cache")
for i in range(len(attrs)):
cmds.addAttr("SkeletonSettings_Cache", ln = attrs*, dt = "string")
cmds.setAttr("SkeletonSettings_Cache." + attrs*, values*, type = "string")
The other thing you can do is export out your skin weights using the export skin weights tool on the toolbar (should be towards the button, icon has a head and an arrow) for all of your meshes. Then go back a step (skeleton placement) and save out a template there to store your joint mover positions. Then go back another step (edit skeleton) to save out your skeleton template. If you export your character (export selected) from here, it should export cleanly. Then you can do a new scene, load your skeleton template, then your joint mover template, then import your model, then load weights.
So, there should be a node in your scene called SceneLocked, and that is the node the determines the state in which the UI opens. If that node got deleted, then it will most likely open at the joint mover phase, since that will be the next thing it looks for. If it finds no SceneLocked node or a JointMover container, it will open up to the default page in the UI (skeleton settings). If that node did get deleted, you should be able to simply create an empty group named SceneLocked to get it back on track (this will be more elegant in V2!)
For your second question, Absolutely! It’s a must, or the animators here would kill me
The goal is to really clean up the interface and the process and be cross platform, but make the end rig result interchangeable with V1!
I’m having the issue with very small windows which cannot be resized to access menu options / inputs on Maya 2015. As recommended earlier in the thread, I’ve set every instance of “sizeable = True” in the python files to false but I’m not seeing any changes. Same with changing the window height in ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.py directly, no change. Unfortunately, this is preventing me from opening the Mannequin sample provided with the tools, which I’m told is the rig to use for marketplace bipeds.
Additionally, when I try to open the “test” sample template for creating a new character, I get this error:
Would be really great if there was a video tutorials series of the animations and animation implementation inside UE4 without that rather buggy and not-production-ready Animation/Rigging Toolkit. That’d be really helpful and cool, since we’re rigging and animating our characters traditionally without any toolkits, or plugins
This may not provide a solution to your question but I want to make sure you’re aware of the simplicity in getting your character into UE4.
The only requirement is to have a single hierarchy skeleton bound to your character. Well, that simplifies it way too much. I doesn’t matter how complicated, grouped or constrained your control rig is, as long as it has a 1:1 joint set up with the bind skeleton. Meaning that you can’t have 8 joints in the spine of the control rig and only 3 in the bind rig.
Take a look at this http://eat3d.com/free/maya_udk_1
It’s part 1 of 3 showing how to get a playable character out of Maya into UDK. The answer you’re looking for is in this video, I hope.
Just ignore all the stuff about default.ini, classes, pawns etc. The main point to pay attention to is baking the animation, deleting the control rig and exporting to FBX.
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