Need advice on getting Maya LT(Steam)/PhysX/Unreal 4 to play nice with each other

Been trying to create a model for Unreal 4, but once I started working with PhysX/APEX for the cloth sim it has been nothing but a fight. I could use any real advice at this point. I have 2 separate issues that are interrelated, all involving PhysX/APEX.

The First is that the plugin will not show/display the collision objects of the ragdoll inside of Maya LT Steam. Folk who are interested can read about all my woes dealing with that here. I have a work-around now, involving PhysX’s stand alone player that takes forever to load, review the objects in there then tweak them back in Maya … blind. It works but it’s dang slow.

The second comes in with Unreal (both 4.11 and 4.12) where the object’s mesh simple disappears anytime I enable the cloth to that object’s texture. I have double checked the assets files to make sure things were properly weighted with no luck.

Any input would be highly appreciated.

System:
Win7 Pro
GeForce GTX 960
Maya LT Steam 2016 Extension 3
PhysX ver. 3.3.20222.00162

Here’s further details on the problem with the disappearing mesh:

When imported into Unreal, it shows up correctly. Checking the ‘highlight’ and ‘isolate’ buttons works as expected, and shows there’s nothing obviously wrong with the model setup. But when the *.apx is selected for that part of the model, that entire part of the model disappears.

Before:


After:

In this case, you can see the texture running in a thin line down to the ground. In other cases, such as the sleeves, not even that is visible. This does bring up some oddities in the bones. Selecting the bones in Skeleton mode does show most of them properly centered on the portion of the model they belong to, however, the selecting the bone for the skirt shows it centered at ground level:

All advice/thoughts on what is going on here is greatly appreciated.

Hello again - update to issues, most of them have resolved when Maya did their 2017 update to Maya LT Steam (and update to the PhysX installer that comes with). Can now see the rag doll correctly, though it has issues being edited and having the edits take. Still, I’m not working blind anymore, which is good.

The skirt disappearing geometry, I found, was due to the FBX Exporter (along with the PhysX Exporter) constantly resetting my work-space/export size scale to meters. It must be set to centimeters to work correctly for Unreal. Why it was not wanting to save my preferences, I still do not know, but it stopped that behavior once the plugins was updated.

I do have a new issue that has stopped me in my tracks, though. Mostly the fact that on export from Maya, a good 1/2 the model’s geometry, and related textures, disappear. I will probably start a new thread about that later.

Instead I’ll leave you with a little vid of the last working model (before the export update corrupted it) with the skirt working with the PhysX/Apex Cloth. Model and animations totally NOT finalized.

[video]- YouTube

I’m actually interested in how your experience with APEX and Maya LT turns out. I haven’t started adding this into my assets yet, but I have a feeling that I’ll have some headaches working the kinks out as well…