Custom Rig additions with the ART Tool?

Hi There,

First off the ART tool seems amazing. Storing rig poses and creating rigs easily is something that will save me so much time, so thank you!

But for the tool to really be perfect for me I’m looking to add custom bits to the rig…but was hoping to do this in a way that won’t interfere with the beauty of being able to import/export poses and use those kinds of functions ART tools comes with…

So, to briefly set the stage for my problem: I come from a maya background. I’m an animator so not fully versed in rigging, and am always into using auto rigging programs because my brain doesn’t work in a way to allow me to rig properly! But I do like to try and get things done in a one man band kind of way so have been hacking stuff together the best I can.
When creating my characters previously (before I wanted to use them in Unreal Engine) I was using maya deformers such as clusters etc to achieve deformations in the character rig. Example, my trumpet character had simple clusters connected to controls that I would animate to achieve cartoony motion of the trumpet being blown…
BUT, because unreal doesn’t have such deformers I’m left with the options of blendshapes or animating the scale of joints to deform the geo. So, I have achieved the desired effect by using control shapes to drive translation/rotation AND scale of joints.
I haven’t got the scripting skills to even make a blendshape postscript…so I was hoping to be able to simple import my trumpet rig (just a joint chain and one bit of skinned geo) and parent the joints to an appropriate joint in the ART tool created rig I’ve made.

Is this possible to do, and I still be able to use the pose library etc?
At what point in the process is the best to parent to import it?

If anyone has any clues on how to get this sort of thing working I would be immensely grateful!!

Thanks again for creating these amazing tools!

James

With the ART toolkit, can