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

Development Character & Animation
42

I can’t seem to find it, is it somewhere else in Maya 2012 or was it introduced later?

EDIT: Ok, so I found it in the “File -> Open” -menu, there is an “ignore version” checkbox. Opening the JointMover.mb in Maya 2012 that way, and then saving it again seems to have fixed the issue.

43

Oh good, was just about to post an img of that :slight_smile:

44

Mannequin is still broken for me. Even when I browse to the files needed the rig isn’t attached to the model. Would’ve been nice to work with the mannequin just to get started when it comes to blending new animations to the existing ones in the editor.

Edit:

Well that’s odd. Tried it again and now the mannequin works.

45

Hey guys will you please do a video on exporting your character mananequin that you create with the toolkit what settings to use in fbx and how to import it correctly into the engine it would be greatly appreciated as it is something I am struggling with at the moment.

46

Not sure if it has been reported yet or if anyone else is experiencing.

I’m getting a few locators visible in the rig. If keyframes get set on these it breaks the hips in particular. Deleting the keyframes on them doesn’t fix things, you have to start over. The locators visible are:

auto_hip_on_off
hip_ctrl_redirect

If you see them I’d recommend turning off locator visibility in your viewport. More seem to pop up when you do a space switch on limbs.

47

I experienced this as well.
I typically turn off selection filters for everything except NURBS curves when animating, but one time I did not and I accidentally keyed something and had the same exact broken hip behavior.

48

I’ll do one this weekend and get it posted!

49

Ah ok. I will fix that as well. I’ll post an update once dropbox is updated with latest.

50

Dropbox code is now updated to fix this. I found another locator, “chest_ik_track_parent”, that was also not hidden, that now is.

Thanks!

51

There seems to be something strange with the FK arm settings. I rotate upper arm forward along the Z axis, nothing else, and this happens.

http://pahlavan.se/dump/2014-04-20_00-38-46.gif

The forearm rotates fine. But not the upper arm.

Edit:

By the way, it does the same in IK mode too.

52

You’re probably hitting gimbal. The default rotate order is xyz, but you can change it to something else, maybe xzy or yzx. If you look at your channel box values, all three axis are probably getting values. Unfortunately, I cannot change the default rotate orders due to how destructive the change would be to existing animations done by our internal teams.

53

I have to read up on what gimbal was again in detail. But when I rotate in gimbal mode only the affected axis changes value and that seems to fix it. Thanks for the help.

54

Scale problem

Hey all, not to get off topic on other questions that are being asked here, but I have a problem that may be a very simple fix and after waiting a while for my question on the answer hub, thought i’d drop a note here.

I’m not a character artist, but i wanted to mock up a prototype to start plugging in to unreal right away so I looked in to ART. It was really simple for me to set up a character and get it in the engine, so thanks for that. My problem is that the scale seems to be way off.
http://gyazo.com/29412db18448cf7f11deef9af2bc27cb
Here, I imported a mesh that matches our scale as well as Unreal4 scale. You can see how it differs from the ART character.

http://gyazo.com/bedc7dee1bd3bc0cff24d2e164a59264
And then inside the engine.

I’m a level/game designer and not too familiar with the content creation tools and our artists couldn’t seem to find what was going on either. So, any hints?

Exported with units as Centimeters as well.

Thanks in advance!

1 Like
55

So I was going through the tutorial videos when I hit a small problem that makes it impossible to proceed. I can’t resize any of the extra windows that pop up so I can’t finish rigging my character.

Below is an example of all that I can see. There are more option under character name that I can’t get to.


Are there any fixes to this?

(I’m using the most current hotfix as well)

Thanks!

EDIT: This was on Maya 2015, I’ve just tried on 2013 and it works so I’m assuming it’s a bug with 2015.

However I still get a bug in deformation setup where I try to change the mode from paint to select and I get: # Error: RuntimeError: file C:/Program Files/Unreal Engine/4.0/Engine/Extras/Maya_AnimationRiggingTools/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.py line 10075: artAttrSkinPaintCtx: Object ‘ART_artAttrSkinPaint’ not found.

Any ideas on this?

56

BUG!

If instead of clicking on Save Pose button, we click on the close (X), the “Skin mesh proxy” does not show anymore and those two blue buttons become disabled.

I have the same issue.

57

A video tutorial showing how to replace the mesh for the final mesh would be nice to have. :wink:

59

Animation Interface Display

Hey ,
Outside of backing up and resetting my prefs, I’ve tried everything I can think of to troubleshoot this problem.
I am unable to load the Animation Interface in full or scalable view. I have to undock which is a problem when I want to switch between the Picker and the Channel Box.
When I undock and drag to redock I get either of the following errors.

https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3822301/ART_002.PNG

When I double click to dock, I get this,
https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/3822301/ART_003.PNG

I’m running Maya 2014 on a Macbook Pro 15inch under Windows 7 Bootcamp.

60

Was playing with the tool more and noticed the default skeleton + proxy geo that gets created when you start the tool is a giant 450cm tall humanoid. However, the sample Mannequin file is a more average 192cm tall humanoid. Any reason the default size is so gigantic? Might save a few steps if we could input an overall height at the beginning of the process or atleast have something a bit more average in height to start. Not a big issue, but thought it was worth mentioning!

Also, when using “Edit Existing Character” you can choose between the Export File or Rig File. I noticed the Range of Motion and a number of other things only work on the Export File. What purpose do you use the Rig File editing for? Stuff like cleaning up layers and removing stuff you may not want in that final file?

Thanks,

  • Jason
61

Yup… still waiting on a reply for that one.

62

+1!

Also would love to see how you guys bring in your final meshes to replace the proxies and utilize the ART Skinning tools and take it into UE4. Would also love to see how you handle your pipeline for a project with animation sharing and re-targeting inside UE4 (if at all).