Unreal Skeletal Mesh Publish from Maya

General
1

I’ve been trying to publish rigs and skeletal meshes from Maya using Ayon and I’m very lost at this point.

I’m guessing this is how I am meant to organize my sets to publish an unreal skeletal mesh?

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I’ve tried not including that top ‘rig’ node but then the abc extractor fails.

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Ayon then seems to extract the skeletal mesh the same way regardless of whether ‘include parent hierarchy’ is toggled?

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Also I don’t actually want it to extract an alembic of the skm at all but I can’t seem to toggle that off.

Should my settings have an ‘extract unreal skeletal mesh - fbx’ and ‘extract unreal skeletal mesh - abc’ options?

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2

@moonyuet This seems to be about the Unreal SkeletalMesh extractions for rigs. I believe you implemented that? Could you elaborate or point to docs (if those exist)?

3

It seems at one point at least the intent was that I could select my mgear rig and creating my publish would grab my geo/joints.

This is what happens right now.
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Only adding the top joint node to the joint set and the top geo node to the geo set gives me that no valid root error from the alembic export.
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4

I’ve ended up being more successful using the regular rig publish and adding my joint_org/geo_org nodes to the skm set to extract them as an fbx.

Is there any way to ignore the single assembly validation though? Or not include parent hierarchy of those nodes? Ideally I wouldn’t have my geo and joints parented to the same node in the fbx so it’s all good to be imported in unreal.

5

Is there any way to ignore the single assembly validation though?

This is currently not exposed in settings - but with this it should be: Expose Maya Validate Single Assembly for rigs to settings by BigRoy · Pull Request #39 · ynput/ayon-maya · GitHub

1 Like
6

The fbx is looking great!

On the maya side, I’m losing that top set from ayon which I’m guessing is going to be an issue once my animators want to publish their work?

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I’m not clear on what publishing looks like for animators. Is the idea that they will publish a rig and that will export an fbx animation for unreal based on that skeletonAnim set?

Nvm, referencing the rig seems to work.

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What if my animators wanted to animate a walk and export that as a start, loop and stop fbx animations. How can they set up multiple anim publishes in the one scene?

7

I don’t believe there’s any configuration or support currently to export multiple “clips” from the scene into an FBX export using just AYON’s native FBX export. Unless @moonyuet knows something about that?

I did once build something along those lines for a GLTF exporter we needed a few years back when still using OpenPype. We just added an extra “string” input that allowed us to input JSON data that would represent the clip names and their start and end points. The extractor would then use that logic.

The creator didn’t even expose it back then (publisher UI didn’t even allow it back then either) but basically you could add a string attribute animation to the instance and then fill it in as needed - it was quite specific and we had a script to populate that value automatically based on timeline bookmarks from animBot (and nowadays we could also rely on timeline bookmarks of maya actually to avoid the need for a plug-in)

Anyway, how would you prefer to configure your animation clips? Are you already doing that through some native maya tools? If so, could you share an example sceen with that configured and explain how it works?