Thank you! 
my pleasure! The new retargeting stuff is wicked awesome. Lina Halper did that, so if you see her on the forums, thank her
Oh boy. This is a fun topic at the office
It’s a long story to explain, but yes, that is intended.
As you know, most 3D apps use Y as the front view. Long ago, probably as far back as Unreal Tournament, models were being brought in facing down Y, then programmers would want them to face down X. UE3 used to have that transform tool built into the skeletal mesh properties, so we’d just throw those values there. This continued on all through our UE3 games. When we transitioned to UE4, the programmers took out that handy box 
But the blueprint components allowed us to still get those values in there instead of changing our entire art pipeline. In the latest version of UE4, and maybe even in 4.4/4.5, on import you can actually type values in there, that way your import comes in clean, and you don’t have to put weird values on your blueprint components! I suppose that’s a pretty good compromise 
I’ll check that out. Maya 2015 is “kinda” supported, as in, there isn’t really any reason it shouldn’t work, but somehow new Mayas find a way to break all your stuff 
The V2 of the tools is being developed in 2015 and being tested in 2014 and on Maya 2015 on Mac (what I currently have access to).
Hey guys,
I am having an issue when exporting my skeletal mesh from Maya into UE4. Please bear with me as I am still learning UE4.
I have followed all the tutorials and documentation that I can find, but I am still having the following issue.
I am using the art tool in Maya 2014 and following all of the proper FBX settings. But when I import my skeletal mesh into UE4, there is no bone hierarchy. All the bones are just at the root. Now, I know something HAS to be wrong with my FBX settings, but I have no clue!
The work around that I have found is just exporting from Maya 2013 (or re-exporting my export in 2013). So I guess this really isn’t a huge issue, but I would like to figure out why 2014 is not working for me. Any ideas?
allright, good luck with it. well maybe its only a problem with my maya. hehe and yeah autodesk is good in making new problems :). Keep up the good work.
Apologies has been asked before (I searched the thread but haven’t found anything) but how do you resize the character after it’s finished?
I went into the export file and went back to the skeleton placement step and the mesh was locked (greyed out anyway), so I was able to resize the skeleton but the mesh stayed the same size. I’m guessing there’s an easier way to do it but I’m too dense to figure it out.
Thanks in advance.
Thanks ! Excellent to hear the workaround you are using in-house
I have never heard or seen that in my life! If you want, feel free to send me an fbx through email and I’ll take a look. Normally, I’d say it’s a content issue, but the fact that it works for you in 2013 kinda rules that out.
Heya! I think you’re pretty much right on the nose with what you need to do. The only thing missing is to unlock the channels of your mesh (they get locked when a skinCluster gets added), and scale the same amount. If the pivot of the mesh/meshes isn’t at 0,0,0, I recommend grouping your geometry and scaling the group. I tend to scale both the master control for the joint mover and that group at the same time so I know they’re lining up exactly right.
Hope that helps!
Thanks man.
I pretty much gave up and created a new rig from scratch using the proxy mesh. I thought that would have worked, but I can’t still open the animation interface. So I am using the “rig settings” node for IK/FK switching. I assume that means my install is corrupted or something.
But your last statement about old version of the art tools code, has my interest. So is there a way to tell what version or build of the maya tools code I am using? So I can compare to other clients and be able to describe the scenario to them. If that is the case. How do I downgrade my code to match theirs? (It’s easier to sacrifice for your yourself rather than demand clients to do something for you).
Heya!
Just to clarify for myself, when you are working with a character, you’re going to Epic Games-> add character for animation, right? If not, the interface will not work, as it requires the character to have a namespace, which file->open would not give you.
As for the code, it would most likely be tied to whatever engine version they are on. For example, if they’re using UE4 4.4.1, then it’d be easy to get that code base from them. I suppose you could also just ask for their entire MayaTools folder to be extra sure.
Correct.
I restarted my workflow and created my own rig with the proxy skinned to the rig. Then added character for animation from the epic games menu, the animation interface opened and was functional. I finished for the night and came back the next day and the animation interface reverted back to the same problem with prompting me to add a character to the scene.
I just get it at this point. I have a female mesh that I created a ART rig for and animated her and everything for the UE4 pipeline. I can open her idle animation maya file and the animation interface opens for her by default. I can then go to the proxy control rig maya file I had just created and it errors like I said… I created the proxy the same way as my female mesh, using the default skeleton structure.
What “namespace” should the characters have though? Is there something that the ART code is looking for in order to function correctly?
Is there any way to get a first person rig setup from these rigging tools? And if not, is that something you could consider adding? Say that you create a character rig and get a matching first person skeleton and rig as well.
man, that’s very strange. if it’s possible for me to look at the file, I’d be happy to. Just to clarify, what I’m understanding is that it does work initially, but then the next day it starts erroring out and asking you to add a character to the scene?
The next day that you work with it, you’re just opening the file again? Do you relaunch the animation interface from within the menu? Last thing I can think of, are you saving as maya ascii?
As for namespaces, it will have the character name from the ‘add character for animation’ ui. so, for example, mannequin:, or if you have multiple in the scene, mannequin1:, mannequin2:, etc.
By first person rig in this case, you just want a simplified skeleton (no torso, legs), correct?
The new version I’m working on now will totally allow you to create a rig with a root and two arms and be good to go. The current version however, there isn’t an easy way to do that. In the past, I’ve told people (and it’s what we do here), is use the tools, and just strip down the skeleton in the fbx file that you export. So you’d create the full character rig, and then when you export for engine, you could open that fbx and start deleting the joint chains you don’t need, like neck/head, and legs. You’d need to keep the spine since the arms are part of that hierarchy though.
Here’s a similar thread on answerHub:
https://udn.unrealengine.com/questions/223508/building-1p-arms-in-maya-rigging-toolset.html
Hi ,
Were in the process of testing your rigging toolset (which is great btw) however were running into a few edge cases which hopefully you can help us resolve.
FK/IK matching causing arm flipping/twisting: (Main animation blocker)
Generate a rig with the latest iteration of Maya Tools in 2014, notice the pole vector control for both arms are offset backwards in IK mode. Switch the arms into FK mode with auto match active, now switch back to IK, notice that the pole vector control has now snapped to the elbow position causing the joints & mesh to twist undesirably, if you repeat these steps the twist becomes worse. Pulling the vector backwards will resolve the issue however the pose is no longer matching.
T pose adjustment using Aim feature:
Once the tool has attempted to create a T pose the user then adjusts the legs using “Aim” however once complete the “Operation complete” dialog box which usually fixes any undesirably offsets between joints and controls no longer appears.
Scene being set to meters vs cm:
If the scene is set to cm’s then the palm/IK controllers appear to be correctly offset in relation to the hands, however if a rig is generated in meters the offset is extreme.
Joint chain tab selection:
(Small issue) if you use the add joint chain feature within joint mover and press tab rather than going to joint count it skips straight to the drop down menu.
Control size:
If a character is particularly large with extreme proportions we find the controls remain small and can only be increased in size within AnimRig manually or within an animation, although this is a suitable workaround if the changes are time consuming they run the risk of being lost if the AnimRig is regenerated, can these be saved out or defined in an earlier stage?
Redundant proxy meshes:
If the finger count for a pinky is reduced to zero a proxy mesh is still created upon rig generation becoming redundant.
Maya 2014 crashes when saving joint mover templates:
We found that if “Hide extensions in filter” is ticked within Files/Projects and also set to OS Native it will cause a crash when saving templates. This is resolved by un-ticking “Hide extensions in filter” in maya 2014.
The bug arises from line number 2965 of the script file ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.py
fileName = cmds.fileDialog2(startingDirectory = self.mayaToolsDir + “/General/ART/SkeletonTemplates/”, ff = “*.txt”, fm = 0, okCaption = “Save”)
Joint chain to joint chain error:
During Skeleton Creation, creating an additional joint chain module to connect with another joint chain module causes a runtime error:
File “//…/Unreal/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_jointMover.py”, line 862, in addExtraJoints
self.addExtraJoints(skippedAttrs)
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded
Also of note, there is no option to choose which joint in a numerically defined chain module for another module to attach to.
I’ll be checking back daily to test fixes and help debug.
Thanks for your time and commitment to the community.
Thanks.
Heya! Let’s see if I can get through all these haha.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
7.) haha, i actually just fixed that today. Let me drop the latest for you in the dropbox location. That will fix both those issues.
Dropbox - MayaTools - Simplify your life?
I have a quick question: Is it possible to add a Mixamo Autorigged character for animation with ART if it’s exported into their “.fbx for Unreal Engine 4” (Which uses the naming conventions of the Epic Skeleton and creates the correct bones?) I was thinking something along the lines of how retargeting works in-engine where you could retarget a modelled character to a default skeleton (Like you would retarget the startercontent character in-engine to rip the animations off pm your character) so you could animate your autorigged character using ART without having to create a new skeleton for it.
So after a long battle with our art director (I haven’t touched an autodesk product since 3d max 9) he said that ART is awesome and we should use it because, well rigify isn’t really all there. Due to autodesk products being ridiculously priced and I can do most of the same stuff in blender I got a trail of maya to just use the animation rigging tools… mainly because spending a ton of time doing rigging and skeletal meshes when you have 30 npc’s slows dev time. I was quite annoyed to start with but nvida also has apex/physx tools for maya so i thought maybe it would be worth it (honestly I bet you more people who subscribe to UE4 use blender over a legit copy of Maya or 3d max)… I began a journey of epic failure. Yes maya installed fine… All was good, I followed the destructions on the unreal docs page to the letter… Fired up Maya (I think I might have vomited a little) and wallah the view port has some kind of over lap going on… IT just keeps going back and forth between one view port and or the animation viewport… I have an idea… why don’t you just put the animation rigging tools into the tool set… or port it to blender… I know most corporate programmers think that open source means free and a huge community of programmers but that is often not the case…