I honestly discovered a new option of Maya settings this way.
So thank you
I remember having kind of similar problem with both ART and Red9 Pack loaded together in Maya.
Couldn’t dig in it too much but as soon as I removed Red9 everything started working again. I may give it a more check this week. I’ll let you know!
Yeah, that UI toggle was/is a God sent. Sometimes Maya really likes to take its time looking at EVERY file on your computer through its default file browsing window. 
Hello, I’m following the Animation and Rigging tutorial on UE’s channel ART: Publishing your Character | 07 | Tutorial Series | Unreal Engine - YouTube and got up to video 7 where I go to take a thumbnail pic. A window pops up about there being Mental Ray Nodes in the model as happened before in the third video, but this time the windows locks up and I cant close it… Maya becomes inactive and I have to End its process with Task Manager. So now I cant continue with the tutorial. Anyone know a way to disable these Mental Ray Nodes… I guess they used to be a part of the Maya app with a license but now Autodesk stopped including a license and Nvidia’s Mental Ray stuff needs to be purchased… That’s all fine and dandy, but they don’t even have it released yet… So I’m very confused on what to do. Hopefully someone knows a work-around. Thanks!
Is there a way to get the Range of Motion feature to work with twist bones.
Hey ,
Glad to know we can update to 2016 
Been looking forward to that.
My question is: How do you turn off a space from the space switcher? For example. I have a samurai.
Weapon Joint: the weapon is parented to this joint.
Left hand: Holds the sword.
Right hand: Draws the sword.
Setup:
In my animation I want to attach the weapon joint to the space of the left hand. Then transfer the weapon joint to the right hand during the draw and swing. Finally I want to return the weapon joint to the left hand. However when I get to the point in my animation where the weapon joint is returning to it’s original place in the left hand after being switched to the right hand space, it has become spaced to both the left and the right hand. Resulting in the weapon joint being matched between them!
**
Problem/Question:**
Is there a proper way to remove or transfer a space? So do I need to go in by hand and edit the space values and position?
Thanks
-Mercurial Forge
Maya couldn’t find some referenced scripts, renaming the “modules” folder to “Modules” fixed it. (MayaTools\general\Scripts\Modules)
(Windows 10, latest dropbox files as of post)
Oh, that makes a lot of sense actually. Red9 likely uses maya’s modules folder (which doesn’t exist unless you ship a .mod file with your tools). ARTv2 has this now, and I had to make sure to change my Modules folder name to RigModules to avoid it.
Are you currently working in an ascii file, and when you get to that step, it complains about those unknown nodes and then crashes?
You could try working in a binary file if that is the case, and see if that fixes it.
My guess is that the jointMover.mb file has the mental ray nodes in it. You could also open that file, delete those nodes (in outliner, turn off dag nodes only), and resave the joint mover file to get around this in the future.
Not out of the box as-is, but it would be trivial to add! Let me put it on my list and I’ll let you know when I get that in.
Heya!
It sounds like what I demo here in this video:
(towards the end)
What is the parent of the weapon joint by default?
To switch spaces, are you opening the space switcher and using the drop-down, or are you just changing the values in the channel box?
If you use the drop-downs in the space switcher UI, it will handle matching and all of that automatically, whereas channel box will not do any of that!
Thanks for the reply!
Yes like at the end of that video.
The parent joint for the “weapon joint” is the “root joint”. I place the weapon joint in the offhand to where I like it, then I then create a space for it to follow. (Using the space switcher menu) This works fine and follows the hand as expected. But when I want to switch to the right hand, (I create a new space and select it from the menu) my weapon joint becomes locked to the both spaces. I can see it in the channels box, both spaces are set to “1”
It seems like when I change the space it’s not disabling the other space?
Here is an example of what I mean. Notice how the space for weapon_anim changes but seems to be constrained to both! 
TBH I don’t know what kind of file it is… I saved templates throughout the process as shown in that video. I don’t even know how to determine if a node is a Mental Ray Node so I don’t even know what to look for. After some searching around I found the DAG Object Only option in the Display menu in the Outliner… unchecked the box which just showed up a bunch of stuff… Not even sure how to look for these Mental Ray nodes to delete them.
Hi . Is it possible to bring your own skeleton to the ART Tool, with joints named appropriately, and bypass the skeleton creation stage?
Question 1) Im about to rig a character with armour and clothes. which is the best way of doing this? Can i do this with ARTv1 using jiggle/leaf joints? Is there a tutorial for rigging/skinning armour and clothes in Maya? Ive searched a lot on google/ but trying to find tutorials on this subject is very rare. well for me anyway. question 2) When will ARTv1 support maya 2017? Question 3) Sorry for asking this, i’m guessing many peeps have asked this, but when will ARtv2 be released? can you give an approx date? will it be this year for example?
It really depends on the use of the specific piece of cloth. You can create JIggle/Leaf dynamic bones and then bake them before exporting or you can use APEX Clothing for UE4 for example ( a basic video: Redirect Notice)
for the dynamic bones baking you can process like in this video, it works also for UE4: https://www…com/watch?v=WLbVR8zKIq4
Hope this helps
Thanks for the links. So jiggle/leaf joints and ncloth can be used to bake into the animation and apex cloth for real time animations in the engine? Those links help a bit thanks but do you know of any more in depth tutorials? also how is the best way to rig armour? things like shoulder pads and belts etc? I’m going to add belts and maybe a bags with shoulder pads and stuff to the character.
I’ve really dun cocked this up.
So I made this model that has been nothing but trouble. To be fair to the model it’s mostly my fault:
Imported it into UE4 and the animations are off kilter. Eventually discovered this problem:
The skeleton is in the T pose and the mesh is in the bind pose.
So I go to my export file in Maya. Hit “assume model pose” and get:
Is there a way to get the rig pose back? Or maybe to at least import the model and skeleton to UE4 in the T pose? Or is this a “better skin it again” situation. Because if that’s the case I’d be losing all my current animations I think?
If I try to go back to skeleton placement I get:
I think this stems from nearly losing the export file a while back and replacing it with a backup I had.
i just read threw the post about the saving issue with the student version of maya. i am working on a project involving the import of mocap via the import mocap tool from the epic games plugin. But when i want to save the file, an error occurs in the script editor telling:
file -f -save -options “v=0;”;
// Error: line 0: Could not save file “D:-(directory of the scene)-” //.
The image above shows whats appearing when i run the script that is suggested here:
if type(newName) is list:
newName = newName[0]
cmds.file( rename=newName )
cmds.file(save = True, type = “mayaBinary”, force = True, prompt = True)
print “File Saved as:”, newName
And this Error appears after running that script:
maybe i missed something and i would really appreciate some help 
Hey there!
Ok, so there are 2 issues here. The UE4 issue is luckily a super easy fix. When you import your FBX into the engine (you’ll want to import and not reimport to get this option), check on Use T0 as ref pose. This will fix your bind pose mis-match issue.
As for the lost model pose and the subsequent errors, that’s a bit harder to debug off the current information. The model and rig pose are stored under a group node named Skeleton_Settings. If you do not have that node, that would be the source of the problem.
(to see this node and its children, you need to go to the Display menu in the outliner, then advanced asset contents, then “both”)
As you can see in the image, the model and rig poses are stored on their own nodes under skeleton settings, so if those nodes don’t exist, (accidentally deleted?) then you would run into this.
Without the full stack trace or a view of the file, I can’t be sure what the error you are running into is, but I think it is from the function that is trying to cache the weights when you go backward. If I had the full stack trace, I may be able to help more there. If you have the latest files from dropbox, that specific line is trying to open a file to write to. That file would be in the MayaTools folder, General\ART\system\ + geo name + “.txt”. If a file like that already exists, but is not writable, that error would make sense.
If you can get it to go backward, then it’s really easy to sort this all out and get your poses back. Check to make sure you can write to the directory and/or file it is trying to cache the weights to.
Not sure which post this was pulled from, but as the error states, newName is never defined anywhere. It’s likely the script had something beforehand that defined newName. maybe try adding this to the beginning:
newName = cmds.file(q = True, sceneName = True)
