Yeah, now that we’ve announced everything, hopefully people can understand why the tools aren’t getting done as quickly 
Fortnite, Paragon, UT, and SpyJinx all use ARTv1, and all have tons of rigging and skinning work to be done!
Hey, this thread is huge so I can’t go over all of the pages. Is the DL version at the first post the most recent one?
Also, thank you very much for creating this handy tool :]
I’ll just post this question here, since AnswerHub is kinda ‘dead’ it would seem.
Paragon trailer looks awesome! Congrats for the fantastic job!
Can’t wait for V2
I created a rig with ART in Maya 2016 with no problems. I then needed to share it with an offsite animator and that’s where I’m having issues. He created a new folder in his project folder that matched mine and copied the export and rig files into the appropriate folders. He also made sure to update his files from the dropbox link you provided. When he goes “add character for animation” he can see the character in the proper folder, with the proper thumbnails BUT 2 errors pop up:
“ERROR: No Characters found in scene. Would you like to add a character now?” (if he clicks ‘yes’ nothing happens)
“Errors have occurred while reading this scene that may result in data loss. Please check the Script Editor for details”
When he goes to the script editor he sees:
*Warning: Error reading file: C:/Program Files…TestCharacter.mb
*Error: Unknown Maya file version: 2016ff07
Thank you for any help you can give. I thought I might have him try to rebuild from the rig, but he doesn’t seem to be able to open it through the ART interface either, though he can open the individual export and rig .mb files directly from the browser.
This kinda suggests that your animator is using different Maya version. Maya is known for rather bad backwards compatibility.
Dont use binary… its very prone to corruption that cant be fixed. That happens for many reasons, such as a single node from a plugin that isnt installed in the version youre loading it with.
I suggest you always work in ascii (.ma) as its way more flexible and can be fixed in an external editor if needed. Also importing rather than opening the file directly will overcome some of the errors on load.
I think ART saves your export and rig scenes as binary by default. Is there a way around this? Would opening the created .mb scenes and saving as .ma cause any issues? I’ve always saved as .ma, so I was a little disappointed that it defaulted to binary.
This should be a feature that you can change in some settings… #hint #suggestion @
.mb has some benefits, it loads faster and file size is on avg about 30% smaller… but thats about it. Id sacrifice some disk space and loading times for stability and edit-ability outside maya. At the studio here we stopped working with .mb years ago, our entire maya file pipeline is using .ma only.
I havent got ART myself since im using my own tool library, but if its core functions are written in .mel or .py its a very easy thing to change manually in the code. I think I should take the time and check ART out, see how it does, maybe Ill be able to give some feedback from an other riggers perspective.
Please share these findings if you can find the time!
After playing around with APEX for days a while back, I managed to get it to work, but I still find it very hard to get the desired results. The APEX plugin in Maya is extremely buggy for me (crashes a lot, weird orientation of collision shapes, can’t undo certain steps, et cetera), which makes it hard to experiment with it. And no matter how I tweak the values in Unreal, it always looks too light or rubbery and behaves very strangely on characters that are moving. The latter might be fixed in the latest version of UE4 though.
Either way it would be awesome to get some general best practices for optimizing topology for APEX, setting it up in Maya and implementing it in Unreal. It’s not much, but here are my notes so far on creating APEX asset - maybe they will be of use to someone:
yes, although I am working with the engine team to get GitHub to always be latest as well.
yes sir! There is definitely a batch exporter. (At least, the dropbox files seems to have it! If it’s not in the engine extras location, let me know. the way those files get added is kind of a debacle)
The custom file script is there in case you want to add something extra to the batch process. Otherwise, just give it a directory of maya files and watch it go.
Cheers!
thanks! It was a ton of work. Probably the hardest crunch I’ve had in years
Is he also using Maya 2016? Maya’s backwards compatability is not super if not.
beat me to it 
yeah, back when it was written, we were having issues with ascii files in 2013, so it saves in mb. In ARTv2, it now saves back in ascii instead of binary. You should be able to open and save as for now. Sorry about that.
Roger that. I will put something together soon. You are correct about the Maya plugin. It is super buggy and crashes constantly for us. We’ve sent multiple emails with our crash logs to Nvidia.
The biggest addition to your awesome list that I would add is, I’ve found it’s almost necessary to create a physical mesh instead of using the graphical mesh as the simulated mesh. My physical meshes are usually no more than 200 verts. I’ve found that the lower vert count also helps the simulation feeling better.
I’ll create a video tutorial by end of week going over my cloth process.
Thanks, I kind of missed this menu, it would seem Might I suggest putting it somewhere more up front in the V2?
Mac get’s absolutely no love. Someone needs to get punished. 4.10 doesn’t include ART in the extras. Who’s sleeping on the JOB this is a repeated offense? It’s not cute anymore. Hey I’m not happy I wasted money on this Mac Pro already, I don’t need reminding how bad it sucks and lacks support… I can’t use my Quixel Suite, can’t use my Lazy Nezumi… Come on guys… :mad:
You should’ve thought about that BEFORE you waste your money on a mac… Seriously man its your fault for not researching your investments. How can you be mad at anybody else for that?