How do I set up the Animation Rigging Toolset for skinning a mesh?

Development Character & Animation
, , ,
1

Two questions:

  1. At what point do you need to skin the ART rig.
  2. If it is after you publish it, where do you find the joint to select? All I see is the mesh, even if I hid the mesh there is no joints beneath.
2

Hi,

  1. You skin your mesh to the skeleton after you have went through the skeleton creation and placement steps and have set your rig pose. You should get a prompt at that point about automatically skin weighting the proxy mesh and the skin weight tools should appear in the ART UI. This is the point in the ART documentation: LINK

As far as not being able to see your joints, you should always be able to find them listed in the Outliner at any point in the process.

Good luck!

3

Hi, thank you for your help. Ok,I can’t select the mesh and I don’t see a mesh in the outliner window. I can select all, but when I try to skin I get the error: skin_geo_upperarm_twist_03_r is already connected to a skinCluster. If I try to export from this point, just to get the skeleton, and import into UE4, I get the error “Failed to find any bone hierarchy. Try to import as Rigigd Mesh option enabled” (which I did try and no luck.) In fact, I get that same error no matter what I try.

4

First, are you trying to skin a custom mesh of your own, or do you just want to get a skeletal mesh with the proxy geometry from ART into UE4? If it’s the latter, that proxy geometry will be skin weighted automatically by the tool (as long as you choose Yes in that prompt mentioned above).

Also, you should wait until your rig has been finished and published before trying to export for UE4. At that point, you should have an export file and a rig file saved in the ExportFiles and AnimRigs folders, respectively. Open the export file, select the skeleton hierarchy and whatever mesh you have bound to it and do an Export Selection from Maya.

FYI, if you are using the proxy mesh that is created in ART, it is grouped inside Proxy_Geo_Skin_Grp in the outliner.

Hope that helps.

5

That worked, thank you!

6

Awesome! Glad to hear it.

7

Hey, I tried to follow these steps but I am having trouble skinning my custom mesh. After Importing my Mesh FBX and adjusting the skeleton, I choose not to skin the dummy and now naturally want to skin the individual mesh instead. However I cant get the bones into the influence list (im quite new with maya but I think normally you just have to select bones and mesh and use bind–>smooth bind ?).

If I try to do so while in the art pipeline, I get the errors described above. If I publish the character and try to do the skinning afterwards there are no erros but I still dont have any bones, I could paint weights with.
A little hint about what Im doing wrong would be awesome.

thank you

8

this should work in case anyone is having the same problem: