Rigging my own characters with Maya Animation Rigging Toolset

Development Character & Animation
1

Hi guys, I’m new here.
I’m trying the new A.R.T. plugin for Maya and I’m having a hard time trying to grasp he concept. I followed the tutorials provided by Epic on youtube and I understood the interface and how the toolset works.

However, I didn’t understand in what part I should add my own mesh to be rigged. Does anyone here master or understand this plugin better than me and can give me a hint on how to do this, please? I just need to be pointed on the right direction.

2

This is still some thing I am personally looking into however a way I could see it being done would be the following steps:

  • Create your skeletal character using the MART (Maya Animation Rigging Toolset).
  • Import your character (it could be just a mesh or rigged character does not matter) into the scene, then begin to align your character to the size/scale of the default character.
  • Use the bone adjustment tools to place your skeleton in the correct locations for your chosen character (the tedious part or you could use the snap tools in Maya to align to an existing skeleton).
  • Further along the line this will assist you to skin your mesh to the created skeleton in MART.

I am still working on this pipeline (hopefully others who have had access longer than myself can help fill in the gaps) currently I just use the straight up FBX import options then drag and drop my completed character directly into UE4.

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Hope this helps.

4

Thank you guys! I’m feeling better now that I know that I’m not the only one that was stuck on this. aeroastroarts, thanks for the pipeline idea, I’ll definetely try it right now. If anyone else have more info, please feel free to share on this thread.

5

I know your pain on this lol. The tutorials are awesome for showing what the toolset can do, but shows nothing at all on how to get it into unreal yet. If you want me to, when I get home today, I’ll make up a quick tutorial on how I have been doing it. I will go from the point after you already have the character rigged and ready, to how to get it into unreal and how to create and export animations from the maya toolset to unreal and how unreal assigns the animations to the skeleton that you imported, and how you can preview them inside the engine on the character without doing anything other than importing them.

I’m not saying my way is the perfect way, but it works for me, and hopefully will give you a starting point.

6

I assumed all you had to do was link your mesh to the skeleton like normal then export the animations to FBX. Process should be identical to Exporting FBX from UDK was my assumption. This is what I used to get FBX into UDK

Granted, I did think it odd the ART tuts didn’t cover the final step

7

you wouldn’t use the rig version to export the skeleton, when you are done with the rig, make a copy of the maya file and delete all minus the skeleton and the mesh. Use the rig version for animations and the clear copy for export the skeleton.

FBX Best Practices
https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Content/FBX/BestPractices/index.html
"It’s easier to have a clean “export” file which is the mesh bound to the skeleton. This mesh will only be used for exporting. The rig is built from this file, but saved into a separate rig file. "