Hi I am curious about the status of IK/FK switching when animating a rig with the ART toolkit? The functionality seems to be broken(when you switch between modes, limbs are rotated/placed into a completely different position. Is this a known bug that’s going to be fixed? Right now you basically can’t switch without breaking your animation which leaves you to animate only in FK which is quite tedious for certain tasks. I’m new to animation and the ART kit so maybe I’m missing something. Here’s the links I found of people having this issue:
I apologize for my absence. Every time we get back from the Christmas break it’s always a mad house as we prepare for GDC ARTv2 is coming along and I’ll show something soon.
In the mean time, allow me to introduce the newest member to the rigging department here at Epic, . He’s going to be taking over ARTv1 support and marketplace releases and has already made many great fixes and improvements to ARTv1.
Thanks for your support and I hope to show some ARTv2 soon!
Cheers!
We’ve actually fixed this internally already. It hasn’t come up a lot because most of our animators bake after mocap import and that’s done over a frame range, but this did come up. It’s actually a really simple fix. I’ll show below how you can update the code yourself to fix the issue. I’m still working out how I want to manage the community relative to my own work schedule. I’m thinking of coming out with a release cadence for the launcher plugin download. I’d rather gather a bunch of issues/concerns/bugs over a period of time and allow for internal testing before releasing anything; that way we don’t end up with more bugs, untested code and I don’t end up doing releases everyday.
The Fix:
So, the issue is in the ART_animationUI.py file, which can be found: {yourComputer}\MayaTools\General\Scripts\art_v1\ART_animationUI.py and the issue was that the matching was actually reversed.
In these two lines, you want to reverse the “IK” and “FK” args.
Once you’ve done that, go ahead and relaunch Maya (if it’s not already closed) and test it out; you should be all good after that. Post up if you run into any issues. Once I establish a good release cadence, this fix will be included, so if you’d rather wait for a fix, just know that one will be coming in the next update (in the launcher).
Hey Davidhammertime,
I just did a build in a default session of Maya 2017 with the default download from the Marketplace and haven’t gotten any errors. I tried both repro’s of building with and without skinning the proxy geo (which is where your error is coming from). Do you have an exact repro case that I could work with to help me better test and fix this for you? Is this during build or is this when you’re switching between phases?
Any info would be great! If this is happening to you, I’d love to fix it so it doesn’t happen to others.
I’m having no luck importing mocap onto a character. I’ve tried to scan the thread to see if anyone has had similar issues, and tried grabbing the latest updates from dropbox.
Using Maya 2017 update 1. When trying to import mocap, I see the timeline shrink to just encompass frame 0-1, a status bar runs, then the standard FBX importer options window pops up. If I click import there, it brings in the skeleton from the FBX, all joint animation info seems intact, but it never remaps to the rig. To ensure that all of the bone names matched, I created a new rig, used the export motion button to export an FBX, then tried bringing in that very same animation onto the character, still had the same result.
Export and Import “Anim” instead of FBX seems to work just fine. Anyone experiencing anything like this? What should my next steps be to try to debug it?
Found a bug
When I import .obj to use it as skin it has a name like ‘SomethingSomething:Mesh’
this ‘:’ in name causes error and prevents me from moving back from deformation setup to skeleton creation
So If I forget to rename the mesh after import and later when want to change something in skeleton setup I have to start everything from scratch.
Renaming mesh at later stage causes other errors and generally breaks the animation tool
Welcome Aaron and it’s also nice to hear you again . I’m rly looking forward the v2 updates you talked about!!
Just checked the IK/FK matching lines you showed, it was fixed with the Marketplace release i guess because I already have the correct version! Thank you for the note.
Right now i’m working on a little batch import for the mocap animations. Something that import a list of mocap animations in FK mode, than match the animation to IK (importing directly in IK creates issues with the knees/elbows autosolve, jittering and some twisting) and finally saves the file.
The process “importMocap” in “ART_importMotion” is called without arguments and gets the needed informations directly from the UI. I don’t want to change the core code to avoid issues with the updates so I’m going to create a process to feed the UI at every iteration and then launch the import process. Please let me know if you have better ideas! Thank you both!
Aaron, thanks for getting back to me. I am on a Mac, are you testing on Mac, or PC? I got the error listed while building the rig (I didn’t touch the guides at all, just trying a default build to evaluate the rig) I uninstalled it and tried a different auto-rig solution that is working for me for now, if I get time later, I’ll try again.
Hey, while working on animating a character, suddenly the base pose (all zeroed-out) of my character changed for whatever reason, and all the animations got “messed up”. That means when I zero-out all controllers, my character goes to a weird pose that’s not my original rig-pose, it’s like all IK handles got offset from their actual position.
I was wondering if there’s a way to reset the base pose within the animation file, to what it is in the rig file, if such a thing happens, and whether this is a known issue that I should be wary of?
Does anyone know how to use set driven blend shapes, keyed in maya, but seen in Unreal. Otherwise it seems that using events in matinee to start a timeline node casting to the character’s morph target is the only way to get lip sync. Is it possible to have driven morphs or blend shapes, either driven by a nurbs curve in Maya or driven by a bone in Blender to read in unreal?
Can I have a copy, otherwise i have to retarget and make a duplicate of the animation with retarget duplicate. Also, with the new download Dropbox - Link Disabled - Simplify your life I lost the ability to load and save my initial skeletal structure, that saves my leaf bones any known way of fixing that?
Many thanks
Following up on this.
I discovered what’s causing my bug.
Apparently if you set the rotation center (on the rotate tool options) to “Manip”, especially if you select multiple objects to rotate, it will modify the base rotation for the rig itself (in the scene, not in the original file, ofc).
I have no idea how to reverse that, maybe lacking Maya knowledge, but in case this is truly a bug - that’s how it happens. Destroyed me a bunch of progress
Hey ! I have had a really great time with the ART, thanks so much for this awesome tool!
Sorry for bringing you to the random, 3-year-old thread here but I wanted to follow up on this update for the first person rig - has this been deployed yet/is still being worked on?
Cross posting a potential issues from the Maya forums. There may be an issue with that causes the right click radial menus to break in Maya 2017. Not a huge issue as disabling the Xgen plugin restores functionality.
[MENTION=2385][/MENTION]: Is the release of ARTv2 imminent? Trying to evaluate if it makes sense to start rigging my character now with v1 or to wait for v2.
HI, when I save pose I get this masagge error # Error: UnicodeDecodeError: file F:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2016.5\bin\python27.zip\json\encoder.py line 390: utf8 #
Hi there!
I wanted to try the source control feature in the ART tool but i keep getting “Perforce Pythin modules not found” error when i try press Test Perforce Connection button. Anyone running into this as well?
If you have a bunch of animations with a common unreal skeleton you can use the asset –> export FBX option (upper left corner of Persona) and then use the Import Mocap option in ART Tools.
If, instead, you want to export the mesh then right click on it in the Content Browser and select Assets Actions –> Export
Hope this is the thing you’re looking for
ARTv2 is coming along and I’ll show something soon.
any known way of fixing that?