Are there any plans to release a stand-alone version of this tool? It looks like this tool could be invaluable to indie developers, and Maya is prohibitively expensive when starting out.
Issue; now the tools work fine up until I try to create the control-rig. I select my project, name my character, hit the “Build” -button and create my thumbnail. After that it opens up the new scene, but stops it’s progress, and will not proceed, the script editor contains only this:
# Error: RuntimeError: The namespace name ‘:’ contains no legal characters. #
C:/Users/user/Documents/maya/2012-x64/scripts/
C:/Users/user/Documents/maya/2012-x64/prefs/
C:/Users/user/Documents/maya/2012-x64/scripts/mayaTools.txt
Custom Maya Menu: SetupScene
Anyone have any ideas? I’m using Autodesk Maya 2012 x64.
Make sure the name you use for your ART character follows Maya naming conventions - Has to start with a letter and can only have numbers and letters and underscores following that I believe (ie, MyCharacter_new123).
I only used letters, all lowercase.
Well, I can’t say for sure but the error line:
Error: RuntimeError: The namespace name ‘:’ contains no legal characters.
Makes it sound like either the name you’re putting into ART, or something else in your scene has some strange naming.
Video tutorial showing ART to UE4 (will also be up in the first post of this thread):
The dropbox code base has just been updated so that the default proxy geometry for the joint mover is closer to the 180cm mark, which is around the height of the blue mannequin character.
The export file contains your geometry and skeleton, as well as all of the joint mover tools. It’s the foundation of your character rig that everything gets built from.
The rig file starts out as a new file that then references in your export file, then the rig code executes to build the rig on top of that. If you’ve added a post rig build script in the publish UI, that also gets executed at this time.
When a user adds a character for animation from the menu, they are referencing in the rig file. There are a couple reasons for the separation of files. By having the export file be separated out, you can polish and update weighting without the need to rebuild the rig, and the animator still gets those updates. The only time you really need to rebuild is if you’ve added joints, or changed the positions of existing joints. By having the rig in a separate file, you can also go in and do any custom work you may want to, like hook up morph targets, or add new controls, etc.
What resolution are your running at? I think anything below 1920 x 1080 will probably get squished like this. I’ll add a bug to fix this issue.
Very cool! Helps to have a little understanding of the setup.
While I’m being annoying, is there any way to disable the fileLister dock? Seems to be tied to the ART plugin and no way to disable it other than closing it manually every time you open a scene. I’m a little OCD with my UI layouts! 
Thanks for all the awesome updates.
Sure thing! I’ve updated dropbox with that change. You’ll need to copy the new userSetup.py again over the one in your documents/maya/scripts folder
The updates come slower than I’d like. Unfortunately, it’s just me on this, and I’ve got our own internal projects here at Epic to support and rig characters/baddies/weapons and such for. At least there’s always something to do! 
Many thanks!! \o/
Hey ,
Playing around with the weight painting tools. Seems like tablet pressure is on by default and the button doesn’t seem to be toggling on/off states. Did a test on the same scene using the default paint weights tool vs ART, and standard paint weights tool seems to work fine.
Aye, and it’s really frustrating 
I’m litterally just going off the default settings when trying things out. From a clean scene, and naming the characters with a simple “asdf” -name. I have absolutelly no clue why it should complain…
Not sure what they changed with the Maya 2015 UI, but just took it for a test spin and can confirm the pop-up ART dialog boxes are getting cut off to the point of being unusable in a few places. Particularly when trying to publish the character, the Character Name field is barely clickable and as far as I can tell you can’t even tab to “Build” button that is inaccessible.
Any way to make them resizable?
Thanks. Now, please make the next video to show how to replace the ART mesh with the final mesh.
I was able to modify the code base so the ART windows could be resized (just went through all the .py scripts and added sizeable = True, or changed it from False to True), and the tool seems to be working just fine in 2014 still (yay, I didn’t break it!), and in 2015 I can resize the problematic windows, BUT whenever I go to hit the camera button for my soon-to-be-published character, Maya gets a hard crash.
This was in the crash log file:
//Python stack:
File: “D:/UE4 Rigging Tools/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.py”, line 8644, in screenshot_take(self=<ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.SkeletonBuilder_UI instance at 0x000000003CB20608>, project=u’Sample’, characterName=u’deleteme’, handCtrlSpace=True, *args=(False,))
self.publish(project, characterName, handCtrlSpace)
File: “D:/UE4 Rigging Tools/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.py”, line 7347, in publish(self=<ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.SkeletonBuilder_UI instance at 0x000000003CB20608>, project=u’Sample’, characterName=u’deleteme’, handCtrlSpace=True, *args=())
cmds.file(save = True, type = “mayaBinary”, force = True, prompt = True)
//====================================================
//last tool: renderWindowSelectContextItem
//====================================================
//panel with focus: modelPanel4
//visible panels:
// modelPanel4
//====================================================
So Ive been trying to build the control rig but I get an error that says “File contains unknown nodes or data. To preserve this information, the current file type cannot be changed” and the message pops up twice?
also when taking a screen shot for the build if I don’t turn off HQ the capture image button I get the error:
Error: RuntimeError: file C:/Program Files/Unreal Engine/4.0/Engine/Extras/Maya_AnimationRiggingTools/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_skeletonBuilder_UI.py line 8624: Only offscreen playblast is supported on this hardware.
So, the resizing windows actually work fine in 2015, my hard crash was coming as a result of my maya prefs folder. Not sure what was causing issues in there, but I’ve had to do this before with ART. So, if you’re having any strange basic behavior problems with ART, maybe try to copy your maya prefs folder (just copy paste it), and completely delete the original folder, launch maya and let it rebuild its defaults. You can always slowly copy+paste stuff back in like your hotkeys and other scripts.
Anyhow, for anyone with UI issues in 2015 or that guy on OSX, you can try adding these into your ART Scripts folder and replacing what’s there. As mentioned above I basically took the python calls for any time a window was being created and added the flag for Sizeable = True to it. Not responsible for your computer exploding or any of that!
, if hosting your scripts online is a problem please let me know and I’ll take them down ASAP. Hopefully can do that when you have time to work in a cleaner fix.
Range of Motion gui doesn’t seem to work with 2015, either. Selecting joints from the list doesn’t update the frame counter (the counter never even appears), and if you try to generate the ROM for selected joints you get an error telling you to select at least one joint.