Hey ,
This might seem like a silly question, but I wasn’t able to find any info addressing my issue. When I am first creating my skeleton using ART, how is it I designate the mesh pieces I desire to be bound to it? It seems that tutorial videos only show the use of a proxy mesh from what I can tell. As it is, when I get to deformation set up, some pieces of my meshes seem to have been given no skin nodes.
It’s disappointing this hasn’t been replied to. I’m not sure whether it’s simply because nobody knows or it is being dismissed as a stupid question.
I’m fairly new to rigging, so if this is something that falls under expected knowledge, it’d be nice if someone could point me in the right direction for documentation on it.
Basically, once you create the joint structure and placed it accordingly to your mesh size/position, what you need to do is to manually skin your mesh on the skeletal hierarchy.
So select your mesh/meshes, select your joints and then go to Skin > smooth bind
I guess that the easy way is to follow this tutorial which explain the step-by-step procedure to skin your custom mesh 
Anyway, next time google it, it takes 2 seconds to search what you’re looking for
Wow that snide google comment really was mean and ignorant. Are you aware that google (which I don’t use, I use startpage) generally tends to attempt to design your searches by preference on previous searches to better market to you? They do this by either your ip or if you are signed in you account history? Thus what might come up on your friendly Surveillance search engine is different for the next guy. I tried this very same search before I gave up on Art and just went back to Blender and Rigidify out of frustration… I never did find any link that answered this question… So thank you for answering this question even though I ditched ART and it was snide.
Actually I work for Google and I’m aware of their plan of domination of the entire earth and I’m totally ok with it, this is my little help in order to achieve world domination.
The time spent to open this thread could’ve been dedicated to simple search ( using your favourite search engine ) and by looking for videotutorials on YouTube ( also own by Google, glory to them, glory to the omnipotent, Cthulhu fhtagn!!! )
Whatever floats your boat I guess 
Always happy when I’m helping someone ( and helping Google of course )
While it’s helpful to know I can manually skin the mesh, its not really solved my problem.
The first time I went through the rigging process with ART, my mesh pieces had seemingly automatically been smooth bound by the time I got to the deformation setup stage. I didn’t get all my weight painting done in the first sitting, so what I did was save out my skin weights with the expectation I could reapply them next time I opened up the program. The issue I face now arose because I missed exporting the weights for one of the mesh pieces, and when I move through the process again, the program automatically binds and weights all the mesh pieces that it can find saved weights for, but completely ignores the one piece that does not. I was requesting to know how ART designates the pieces to be skinned in this process so that I could make sure this extra piece was added, as my attempts to manually add the lone mesh with smooth bind after this stage have caused issue, and using your suggestion of manually skinning the mesh with smooth bind seemingly doesn’t allow me to import the weight information I’ve done previously without disastrous results.
I’ve got an inkling that if I could simply add this mesh piece to the existing skincluster created after it automatically imports the weighting, all would be swell, but I can’t find any information on doing that. And I really have had a look. So if you think you understand how it is I’m going awry, I’d really appreciate the help.
Hi Claymoar, you may have better luck getting your issue addressed by posting to this thread from the maker of the Animation and Rigging Tool himself, Jeremy Ernst: https://.unrealengine.com/showthread.php?2447-Animation-and-Rigging-Tools-FAQ-Known-Issues-and-Feature-Roadmap While he is currently pretty busy preparing for the up-coming GDC, I’ve noticed he still takes time to frequently respond to this thread.