I have a model im working on, got a rig made with ART, (works great!) and got to the skinning of weights part, and i had to call it a night. so i saved my work, and today i went to reload it into ART and i cant… i still need my control rig and animation setup from ART but i cant reload my character into it. Im probably just missing a step. Thanks for your help!
Hey there!
I’m a little confused by the post, so I’ll just run through the process I use here and if it doesn’t answer your question, just let me know which area specifically sounds like the area you’re running into issues!
Character Creation Process:
-Setup skeleton settings
-Place skeleton in mesh
-Paint skin weights (if you had no model at this point and used the proxy, you skip this for now)
-Build Control Rig
Now let’s assume you didn’t have your model yet, and now you do, so you can go to Epic Games → Edit Existing Character → select the character you want and hit edit export file.
Now you can import your mesh, and start binding it to your skeleton. If all you do is skin weighting, there will be no need to rebuild the rig, as long as you make sure the file gets saved with the model in rig pose (in the UI, reference pose manager → assume rig pose)
For some clarification on the two files that get created, the export file houses the joint mover, your mesh, and your skin weighting. The rig file is what gets built from the export file (it makes a new scene, references in the export file, and then builds the rig on top of that). All edits to joint placement, skin weighting, etc, are done in the export file.
Let me know if I can clear anything else up. From your post, I got the impression that you had already built a control rig, but hadn’t yet skinned the model fully or were maybe using the proxy geo?
Thanks!
thank you for your response, maybe im not understanding how to save everything properly. am i not only saving the .mb file for maya? i have tried saving characters out in the ART, but i can never seem to load them again. I only have access to the basic Manichean. Example: i have a character that i have done half the weight painting. when i reload that .mb file to work on, i cant access the ART for that character. It only lets me make a new rig, or load a character (aka: The Mannichean). Im probably just missing something easy. thanks for you help!
ok, I think I know what’s up. When you load the character, you’re just opening the file through Maya’s menus? Have you tried using the Epic Games–> Edit Existing Character menu? Your character will only show up there though if you’ve run it through the rig build process. Otherwise, to get the UI back up, you can actually just hit the Create Character option in the Epic Games menu and it will actually load the UI back up in the correct phase. So if you were painting weights with the UI, it should load with that step active. If you were still placing joints with the joint mover, it should load with that step, etc.
Let me know if that’s what’s going on. If not, you may need to post a screenshot so I can better understand what’s up.
Thanks!
OMG YOU ROCK!! i was afraid of clicking into rig creator in fear of loosing the skinning i had done. Took me right back to where i was, thanks so much! you made my night! Keep up the amazing work 
No problem! Happy to help!