and if I haven’t already shown this, this is addressed in V2:
Dropbox - v2Leg.gif - Simplify your life?
I have tried all day with all versions of Maya (2014, 15, 16 (Student versions)), but I keep getting this error when I try to adjust the skeleton after binding skin for the first time. ie. by going back to Skeletal Placement and changing the joint movers and then going back to Deformation Setup results in this error for a mesh which already has weights. The error shows up during importing some of the weights. The mesh in question shouldn’t have a naming conflict with the bones as far as I know (It is called “BellyPlateSupports1_1”). This also happens for other meshes present in my character but not all of them, not sure what is so special about these.
I tried both the version from UE4.8 launcher version and the dropbox link posted in the forums.
Any help will be hugely appreciated !
I see in the videos there is an option to match when doing space switching but in the current version that I downloaded from the first post it’s missing.
I was playing around with space switching and saw that things were snapping around. Was it just broken before or is there some other good reason that option is gone?
Also I think I saw someone already filed a bug with some of the body parts appearing with the enitre right arm and the right thigh preview meshes being generated with flipped faces. I tried ART out about a year ago and I’m pretty sure this wasn’t an issue then. I’m using this with Maya 2016.
Also, is it possible to ever have the option to have knee target controls like on the elbows? I personally prefer working with target controls rather than pole vector numbers. What’s cool is you can constrain a bone to those controls and use that info in the TwoBoneIK skeletal control inside Unreal itself as well. At least I think that’s how that option works.
GUI picker error when selecting non-rig objects in Maya
I’m running a few scripts outside of A.R.T. having to do with vertex selection. However there’s an A.R.T. script job that’s running and it’s throwing errors as I manipulate the mesh
// Error: RuntimeError: file C:/Projects/***/Tools/MayaTools/General/Scripts\ART_animationUI.py line 4306: Object '(0.0, 0.0, 0.0)' not found. //
Is there any harm in just turning the script job off? It looks like it’s a script job for the GUI picker.
Thank you , I really appreciate you being available to help us out 
no harm! I fixed that in V2 as well.
I feel bad I can’t do more 
So I have recreated my project from scratch, and everything is working fine but I haven’t really started painting weights yet. I just applied a geodesic voxel binding skinning. So far so good. Will report back if any of the painting and copying weights between parts causes it to break.
Right on. Thanks !
I’m finally getting the hang of this tool and almost have weapon animation exporting working too.
(I fixed my below described problem. I redid the skeleton of my shotgun from scratch in Maya using only joints and now ART properly exports my shotgun cocking. SO MUCH TIME WILL BE SAVED! I AM ALMOST AN EXPERT AT ART NOW!)
I have this shotgun that I originally modelled in 3DS max a while ago and I imported it into Maya. Now I’m experimenting with making a cocking animation.
However, out of the 5 bones that my shotgun is composed of, only 1 is exporting.
I tried manually exporting the animation not using your plugin, but just selecting the bones myself and export selection. All the bones and their animations export correctly. Now I’d have the added work of trying to offset my shotgun to be at the origin manually if I were to go that route, which I was hoping to avoid thanks to ART.
Maybe my shotgun skeleton isn’t set up correctly for ART to autodetect the bones properly. The root and this other bone are considered locators by the attributes editor. The rest are considered joints. It’s only exporting one of the child joints which I use for animating a shotgun shell during reloading animations. The root bone, or the sliding part aren’t even coming out with the fbx. And just to see what happens when I animate the bone that does export, that one didn’t come out with any animation because the root it was attached to was missing.
Hey guys,
Firstly, thanks for the awesome tools!
I’m having a bit of an issue with the export fbx settings not saving. Any time I update frame range, file location, etc and try to save the scene, none of the edited fields get saved.
I’ve found the ‘ExportAnimationSettings’ file in the outliner and it too is showing that nothing gets updated.
I am running Maya 2015 SP5, so I’m guessing that this is probably where the issue lies, but would love to know if there’s a workaround or anything.
Thanks!
I have another completely unrelated issue, thought I’d post it separately.
It seems like when the spine is in FK mode, it keeps resetting. I think it resets back to 0,0,0 relative rotation. All other controls stay in the correct spots. So as I’m trying to create aim offset poses, and my guy is bending forward a bit, it keeps resetting to an upright straight backed posture.
If I save my scene, and reopen, it also resets somehow. It’s really weird.
At least, the pose manager seems to properly save the pose. But the thumbnail still shows the character a bit upright I think,
Oh, also, now for the most important part. Importing into Unreal. It seems to not recognize it as an animation but thinks it’s a mesh. So I select the skeletal mesh option and bring in the animation. However, it then fails and says invalid or corrupt file if I look in the logs while running visual studio.
I’m able to import the fbx just fine into 3DS max for example and see the entire skeleton heirarchy and animations playing back just fine. I really have no idea why an animation exported by ART itself could be giving Unreal so much trouble. In fact, Unreal Engine crashes at any subsequent attempt to import an fbx with an access violation trying to initialize the FBX library or something.
But, when I reexport the animation through 3DS max, or Maya would work too, and make sure I use settings I know always work for me, Unreal recognized the fbx as a proper animation and imported it.
Slight update, I now selected all controllers and set a keyframe at frame 0. This made Unreal finally be able to open it, but it still fails to import because it says “This does not contain any valid animation takes”. I tried giving it a keyframe at frame 1 as well. The pose doesn’t change since I’m just using this for anim offsets. When imported into 3DS max it now shows 1 keyframe at frame 0 for all bones, which it used to show differently. It refuses to have a second keyframe even if I set one in maya. I wonder if it thinks I’m making a 0 length animation.
Sorry if this has already been asked. But are there help videos anywhere besides the playlist?
The learning videos section in the Help tab throws up an error, and the videos don’t exist in the location shown.
I am using the version from 4.8, but it does not seem to have the new A pose of 4.8 in mind, right? Seems to be a bit hard for me to make the skeleton look really good with the 4.8 example animations.
The skeleton the ART creates for example has “parallel” going joints from the clavicle to the upper arm:
while the 4.8 mannequin and also the animations have the clavicle to upperarm going behind, like this:
This makes it quite hard to make the skeleton exactly fit the 4.8 one.
Thanks . Looking forward to 2.0.
Hey thanks for responding… I remember when I first started using ART it was the first thing I tried and it caused a lot of errors so I ruled it out, but that doesn’t seem to be the case anymore. It’s entirely possible I wasn’t familiar enough with it.
There’s something else I wanted to ask you. There’s a virus in Maya called Turtle (Actually, it’s not really a virus, but it might as well be) that puts locked nodes in every scene file you have as well as adding a ‘requires’ to the ascii. Farther down the pipeline I started exporting animations using ART and none of them worked because of bloody Turtle nodes interfering and getting exported with the animation.
Have you had to deal with this? How did you solve it for a massive amount of files? Every time I open another file with the node it will re-enable the plugin, and if I don’t catch it, it being re-enabled will infect every other scene I open and the cycle repeats.
Even if I went through every single file and saved it as ascii and then edited every ascii file to remove the requires turtle line then saved every modified ascii file as binary… it wont even let me change the rig files made by ART because it doesn’t know the custom nodes.
Autodesk is the enemy of mankind.
Hey there!
Am I understanding correctly that your shotgun hierarchy is not entirely made up of joints? That very well could be the problem. I believe the code that exports weapons as part of the motion exporter duplicates the joints, bakes the motion down, and removes anything that isn’t a joint. If you want to send me a file (.@epicgames.com) I will gladly take a look and make sure everything is setup correctly. Sorry for the late response. It’s been busy here as usual
Hmm, are you saving your file after exporting? I don’t think there should be anything about Maya 2015 that would prevent this particular feature from working, since it’s just creating attrs and setting them. I did a quick test to see if I could repro (mind you, this is in 2014) and you can see the attributes update. However, if I don’t save my file after exporting, those changes will be lost!
whoa, that’s incredibly strange. Do you have a file you can send over so I can look at it?
As for the Unreal part, the animation exporter should only export bones, no meshes. Unreal tries to guess what you’re importing based upon what is in the FBX file. You should be able to check, import skeletal, uncheck import mesh, and then you should get your animation import options.
The UE4 programmers made me remove them from the folder due to size haha. Here is a link to them in dropbox:
Dropbox - LearningVideos - Simplify your life?
Place this folder under /MayaTools/General/ART/Help/ and put the Learning Videos folder in there.