Livelink is hardcoded to search for a top node as either “root” or “arcblade:root” within MayaLiveLinkPlugin.cpp. You don’t need Art tools for livelink, just take the block of code out of the source and recompile. Unfortunately I think this will stream everything in the scene so you’ll want to probably add a feature for streaming only specified objects. Live link is still in a dev stage. Still pretty cool.
Remove this:
if (!Name.Equals(TEXT("arcblade:root"), ESearchCase::IgnoreCase) &&
!Name.Equals(TEXT("root"), ESearchCase::IgnoreCase))
{
continue;
}