I started with HumanIK b/c it comes with maya, its a full featured rig, its easy and low bar for entry. I animated with it, and argh the bar isn’t as low, there are definitely workflows and things to understand about how to use it well. Ok, learn that, OR just go with UE4 Animation and Rigging Tools. Those would be a better and more versatile rigging system, but higher bar for entry, meaning I’ll have to dig in and learn how to use it properly. I know there will be gaps in understanding from the videos just from the speed at which the videos goes.
Do I make the switch, for the cost in progression forward for a week or two or stick with HumanIK and learn better HIK animation practices?
with HIK Z up is your worst nightmare…
I’m not 100% familiar with Maya even if I’m using it constantly, so I’m not 100% sure that it cannot be done, but with HIK you can’t switch the Up axis, so if you want to use it you have to rotate 90° every time you export an animation/rig or when you import inside UE4…its annoying…
On the other hand ART is a straight forward rigging plugin…learning curve is not that complicated and if you’re used to HIL you feel easier to use…
I’m using a custom script for retargeting mocap ( nothing fancy, only orinet constraint retarget ) and I’m getting used to use ART…quite good, lots of room for improvement, but Jeremy Ernst V2 version looks pretty **** good!
I’ve been using Maya since 2000, and I have a theory, if you hate Maya (or any high end software)… it knows and will treat you accordingly, crashing, buggy, not working right… it knows!
PS: Yesterday I had 15-20 crashes during a ART rig creation…so be prepared to some awkward crashes without any specific reason…well, similar to Maya random crashes
Dave S has also been forced into the world of game engines? Ah it is a cruel world indeed. BTW thanks for the Fluid tutorials on vimeo years back during the ol DD days. What I love doing is using my own custom rigs that I make in maya and then using Human IK to define the joints and controllers and then use the mocap library to put animations onto the rigs and then hand animate what you need after you bake the animations to the controllers.
But, this requires you to have some medium level character rigging skills. Which I’ve survived on for a decade now. I just wish Unreal3 or 4 had point cache so I could just use whatever I want to animate my characters.
I choose ART over Human IK b/c of workflow back and forth to unreal. Human IK works nice enough, its been a while since I tried it. For bipeds ART tools work nicely when you’re trying to loop back and forth to engine and unreal. I’d say try human IK, make a rig animate it, bring it into engine, if you like it, YAY! If you find it troublesome like I did mostly in Maya if I remember, then try ART tools
Ill have to reply here too to remove some misconceptions about HIK and maya/ue4 that havent been completely cleared here:
HIK is not a rig designed to hand animate straight from t. Its supposed to work as a mocap retargeting and editing rig. Even tho you can set manual keys on the controls, Youll most probably have found out by now that its not a very intuitive and easy flow process to be doing. If you are animating all your actions 100% by hand, my suggestion is dont use hik.
Maya is y-up and there is no reason to not just keep it that way. Any asset will be converted at import time to z up by ue4 just fine. I never bothered about this doing what I do in maya and ue4 and never found it an issue. Better not to mention y-up as an issue unless there is actual examples of it causing problems.
2.5. Again… I suggest not to animate with hik, people use to do it all the time, but only because they dont realize that custom engineered animation rigs are waaaay faster and easier to use (like the ART one for example). Hand animating with hik feels like driving a BMW… Flintstone style.
sorry for the ranting, but it had to be said one day.
HIK is very capable of hand animation in my experience, it’s mostly issues with constraints that I’ve seen people run into. Once you get a handle on its simultaneous use of IK/FK and understand that you’re going to have lots of auxillary effectors that aren’t part of your rig hierarchy, it starts to make more sense. You can use set driven keys to get past some of the clunky UI, and I really recommend grabbing red9 studio tools if you want a compatible pose manager.
For one off / personal projects I would choose whatever is giving you fewer technical problems.
I’m brand new to UE4. I have experience with Poser, DAZ3D, and Blender. My question is, I saw a documentation on UE4’s site on A.R.T. Is this something that comes already in UE4, or is it something I have to download and add to UE4 with an install? If the latter, how do I go about getting and using ART? Thanks for taking time to consider my “tadpole” question? - F.
Hey, if you have downloaded ue4 its already in there.
It should be found here: #:\Program Files\Unreal Engine\4.#\Engine\Extras\Maya_AnimationRiggingTools/
Also, have a look this playlist introducing the tools…
And here the forum thread run by Jeremy where you can post questions and requests regarding it.
If I had Maya I would use ART, but being that I have Maya LT 2016 I will try and use HIK unless there is a a version of ART the will work with Maya LT now.
No Python in Maya LT, no ART…Jeremy said a bit ago that he was in contact with Autodesk to see if there were any possibilities to integrate ART in Maya LT, but Autodesk, being Autodesk, said no.
If you are doing the animation all hand key, then I’m not sure if Human IK it’s the best,
It’s excellent when you use an animation library, or do you have large files of mocap, and you need edit that file.
Also, it’s good if you require sharing animations between differents characters
take a look at this human IK library: http://www.flipbookmarket.com/Maya-MB
- F.