Love what’s going on in dev on a daily basis, but can i as a licensed user post the Maya rigging tools (completly python based) to Blenders community website to try to get this working within Blender? if even not explicitly allowed feedback from UE4 Devs would be pucker, If allowed Blender tools could well be on the way. But if i have to do this on my own it’s a long way off, I hate Python and never really looked into it, can be useful for scripting but for plugin or main engine development ive just learnt C/C++ and have no intention cramming python into my limited brain space (mostly occupied by Beer, Food, mixed with other less important things ) But many Blender community members could help out with python based code if allowed to use the Maya tools code as a base for development. Cheeeeeeers KB
I’m sure we will have the official legal answer from our legal team shortly(though my gut according to the EULA says probably not).
As the creator I can say that very little of the code, if any, would transfer to anything outside of maya. It may use python, but it also uses Maya’s python modules for nearly all of the functionality. Aside from just generally seeing how things are structured and some of the logic, pretty much everything would be a complete rewrite from scratch to have it work in any other application. So far, it’s taken me alone nearly 2 years to write what shipped in March and there’s still tons to do!
The official, legal answer is that the Animation and Rigging Toolset is treated as an engine tool, and is not permitted to be distributed to anyone other than our subscribers.
Cheers Jeremy & Stephen, Fair enough. If you don’t ask you don’t get, Jeremy have to give you praise for such a nice tool from the vids ive seen. Maybe you can take a look at blenders code if you havnt already to find a cross animation system using the code already in the app, Ive shown already that complex character riggs can be pushed out Blender:
If you could find a way and the time to cross tools would make a lot of poor Indie devs very happy.
Stephen, Good to see even the legal eagle team at Epic HQ is willing to get involved in problem resolution and direct feedback.
I realize this thread is a couple of months old, but I just ran across it and was wondering if Blender users, that are also UE4 subscribers, could work together on dissecting and porting the tools over? When/if it’s finished it could be put in the UE4 Marketplace? From everything I’ve seen concerning licensing with UE4, I assume this would be OK, since it keeps everything within the UE4 community, but official feedback would be nice.
First off, i’m not part of the legal team, and as a result my response is not the official one. We should wait for them to chime in before moving forward.
Subscribers, who have access to the tool, and want to port it to blender, should be allowed to. Once that is done, if you want it shared for free we would definitely be happy to explore the best option for that with you (store or even engine download). If you want to charge for it, I’m not sure how that would fall into our EULA.
I just want to add something for anyone trying to port A.R.T. to anything especially blender.
I don’t know how many, if any, of the people asking for a port or actually trying to port the code of A.R.T. has even looked at the code of A.R.T. but just by glancing at some of the files I can tell you It uses so much Maya Embedded Language and core maya functionality it would be such a gigantically huge feat to rebuild that in a different program. It’s not just some python code that can be copied and pasted into another program.
Although porting could be possible. You would have to change all the maya/mel stuff to blender stuff, if those systems even exist in blender. If not you’d have to add that functionality to blender. Does A.R.T use any of the Maya Expression Language ? If it does it’ll be even harder to port. Also im not sure currently the state of blender’s python system would even handle this. They have their own ‘mel’ system called the BPy API. I think it only supports blenders database and not the blenders operations. so that could be a huge problem.
Although I’m working from an old memory about blender and many years have passed since i used blender so my information might be dated but, this should help someone trying to tackle this mountainous feat.
My coding skills are no where near where they would need to be for this. I was just curious about it being possible if enough of the community with the skills jumped on board. I haven’t looked at the code myself (yet), but it sounds like at least a few would need both Maya and Blender, then see what’s being done in Maya and work out how to do it in Blender. Seems a better option than attempting a code port.
) But many Blender community members could help out with python based code if allowed to use the Maya tools code as a base for development. Cheeeeeeers KB
