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

Development Character & Animation
814

I can’t seem to export the character in a t-Pose, I’ve been going into edit export file and setting the character to rig pose and even resetting the model pose so that it’s in a t-pose. I can just rotate the arms in Unreal Engine so that it’s in a T-Pose and it will work with re-targeting animations. But I’m sure it would be better to be able to export the character in the “Rig Pose”. Also after exporting, if I click on set rig pose or model pose the character bunches up into a ball. Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks.
5eed1ed79df8724f591104d40c6effa218357188.jpegb6a13e566db11c8b695b29effa093dfe51838175.jpeg

Capture.JPG
Capture.JPG520×618 24.8 KB
Capture4.JPG

815

Already made a thread for this but is there any way right now to rig up quadrupeds. I first I thought maybe just positioning the bones during the Skelton position mode, however when it comes to creating the control rig the axis is totally off (probably my fault) and the control rig for the hips, spine and head are all faced horizontal as if it still a bipedal. When the Skelton created and skinned everything moved and works quite nicely but moment control rig built is messes up.

Any help is appreciated, I have 4 days to rig a horse.

816

Your best bet is to rig it manually. The orientation you’ll need for bones alone will be different from a bipedal character, which will impact the rig if it’s automatically generated.

817

SOLVED! In newer UE4 versions you have to click on the little triangle to expand import options and check use t0 as ref pose.

Capture.JPG
Capture.JPG521×739 54.9 KB

818

Glad you figured it out! Nice window tiling that you’ve got going on in your screenshot :wink:

819

Yeh, I thought I would show off UE4 best feature, the import settings that cascade across the screen when moved and locks you from accessing the engine until closed :slight_smile:

820

Hey there!

For the skeleton only being visible for a frame, and the mesh having no materials in the fbx, that is expected behavior. The skeleton was created by duplicating the main skeleton, which was hidden. The mesh gets exported if you have any morphs to export, but it doesn’t export any materials, just to cut down on time and file size.

821

nice! I always use that checkbox, as FBX/UE4 doesn’t really know how to deal with multiple bindposes or bindposes in general.

822

I’ve rigged a bear once in a pinch with ART, but a horse… that’s gonna be tough due to their legs. 2.0 will have it though! (Which totally doesn’t help you right now).

Maybe use this rig and constrain your horse joints to that control rig?

823

thank YOU! Going to give you a shout out during the stream tomorrow.

824

We still use 2014 here at work, but we will be switching to 2016 likely sometime this year for the new multi-threaded DAG.
2015 should work ok, just make sure you’re up to date on your service packs. 2015 service pack 5 should be the most stable 2015 build.
I found in general I was getting crashes in 2015 lots due to scriptJobs, but the service packs helped.

825

hmm, so i just tried to repro this, with no luck (though in 2014):

Dropbox - Error - Simplify your life?

Try those same steps in the video and see if you still get an error.
I’m betting at some point you might have used undo a couple times possibly? The “root” bone gets renamed to jointMover_root during that step, so see if you have that in your outliner. It’s possible it got renamed, and then maybe something was undone, but not far enough back to have the renaming revert.

826

Did this get solved?

827

Did this get resolved? I can’t remember if this was one of the issues I looked at via email.

828

Yeah, I think it was part of the Maya fbx export meltdown. After I reset ny computer it was working again.

829

I think I was trying to animate the root bone with the animation, but it was only there for one frame. I think I ended up constraining the root bone to the pelvis on the one frame that was visible so that with would have root motion then exported it again. It was not a big deal just confusing when I wanted to scrub through the animation and the character would disappear.

830

I was able import my character into UE4 in a t-Pose without checking the “t0 as ref pose” box, but it still tells me that a few of the bones are missing from the bind pose. I selected all of the skin and ran a short script that gave me to delete all bind poses and save a new bind poses, which I thought would make everything clean and perfect for import. The import warning says “add them [missing joints] to the bind pose and re-import the skeletal mesh” I’m just wondering if this is even possible.

831

Are the joints it lists weighted? If not, they won’t be in the bind pose. That warning really isn’t a biggie though, as long as you’re getting what you’d expect to see!

832

you can run this quick python script and make it a shelf button if you want:


import maya.cmds as cmds
cmds.select("root", hi = True)
joints = cmds.ls(sl = True, type = "joint")
for joint in joints:
    cmds.setAttr(joint + ".v", lock = False)
    cmds.setAttr(joint + ".v", 1)
833

I didn’t add any weights, I don’t think they should be any different from any of the other joints, in particular the other finger joints.
But yes, re-targeting works perfectly fine with the rig despite the warning.