Edit in Maya After Auto-Rigging?

[Chronoloco]

I feel like this is a silly issue to have, but for some reason, I'm hitting a wall with it. To be honest, I'm relatively new to Maya, so I'm sure it's a simple fix... but...

When I import my FBX file from Mixamo's website (of my Fuse created character), then I can make more modifications like normal, inside Maya. By grabbing faces, edges, vertices, etc... So I can stretch things, move things, customize random stuff like that, no problem. (Including what I'm ultimately trying to do, which is rig the face for facial animations, preferably AFTER I run the Maya Rigging script for the auto-rig feature).

BUT, once I run the Maya rigging script, so that my character is fully rigged, I can no longer access things such as faces, edges, vertices, etc... So at the moment, I'm stuck making those modifications BEFORE rigging, and then once the character is rigged, I can't edit anything (including simple stuff like UV maps for putting a logo on a shirt as an example).

Can anybody tell me what's going on? Does the Maya Rigging script, "lock" something so that you can't access those features (highlight faces, edges, vertices, etc...) without manually unlocking them? Or is it a simple hotkey that I'm forgetting about? If I want to rig the face, do I have to do that BEFORE running the Auto-Rigging script for some reason?

[Chronoloco]

And worse yet... If I start to create a rig for the face (before applying the Maya Rigging script to the skeleton), then once I eventually DO try to apply the script, it says:

"# Error: ERROR: Hips cannot be found and is necessary for the autorigger to complete process."

So what's going on with that? If you even create ONE JOINT anywhere in the scene, it completely kills the script. I'm hoping that there is a simple solution that I'm just not experienced enough to know yet. Any idea what's going on?

[Chronoloco]

Hahaha... Ok... I took some Maya classes a year or so ago, and felt pretty comfortable back then, but I've been so focused on music ever since, that I haven't even touched the program since. I knew the first problem was something simple...

SOLUTION:
Go to the Channel Box / Layer Editor tab, and just make the Mesh Layer usable there, by switching the "R" to a blank box.
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So got that out of the way...

I'm going to go ahead and try to create a facial rig now, AFTER applying the Maya Auto-Rigging script... But if you happen to know the answer, I would still like to know why creating a new joint (even if it's not attached at all to the character) would prevent the script from running, but then if you delete the new joint, then the script works perfectly fine.

Is that supposed to function that way? My entire FIRST post up there has basically been answered by the solution I just posted... But the second post / question, I'm still curious about.

[Chronoloco]

Ooooooh... After trying to create a facial rig, and having trouble with it (because I couldn't select the eyeballs or teeth or tongue as "objects", if you know how, please let me know). But since I couldn't parent those things to my facial rig, then I had to start over again...

This time, I went back to before I used the Maya auto-rig script, and then built my facial bones, and parented those to the throat/neck joint or whatever, and THEN when I tried to run the script, it seems to have worked this time... So... That's pretty cool.

If anybody else has tried to do any facial rigging with their Fuse characters, I would love to hear about your progress, but for now, I guess I'm done updating this thread unless anyone else has anything to add to it.

[BadTertle]

Hi Godfather,
The maya script (I wrote it so you're talking to the right guy) is pretty picky at the moment about having only an autorig in the scene when you hit rig. Its definitely due for an overhaul to make it more robust and more easily expandable, more features, etc. It will take a little while for me to get back to it as Fuse is our number one priority right now. Our workflow at Mixamo is to to the basic rig first and then start adding any extras we want for that rig.

The reason you can't select the teeth and eyes as separate objects is it is all one mesh at the moment. You can go into face mode, select all the faces for, say the left eye, and go to polygons>mesh>extract. Be sure to delete non deformer history after you're done to keep the scene clean. Select the meshes and its Edit>Delete By Type>Non deformer history.

Hope that helps.

[Chronoloco]

Yeah, I feel like I got close with that, I actually did the Exract thing already (didn't clear non-deformer history)... But I did that again just now, to try it out, and now my problem is, how do I make the now extracted eye, it's own object? I can still select it by it's faces or whatever else, but if I need to parent that "eye" as an object, to a bone in a rig or something, is there another command somewhere, such as "turn all of these faces which happen to form an eye" into an "object" or something? Like I said, I'm still a novice with all of this stuff, but the fact that I was on the right track with the extract thing, seems like surely it's only a couple more steps, and then I'll have that eye parented to the bone, and I can make a good run for the rest of the rig from there.

And thanks a lot for the response! It's always nice knowing that the people that write an actual script, actually exist. Awesome job with everything so far!

EDIT:
Aaaaaaah! I'm not REALLY 100% sure what the difference is, since I'm just toying around with menus, but I was just one option off in that Mesh menu... "Separate" right above Extract seemed to do the trick... (I Think?) Hopefully I can make this stuff work now, without his face accidentally falling off like it's melting or something, once I start to animate expressions. Thanks again for the help! (And if you happen to KNOW that me "separating" instead of "extracting" is going to break the entire system, feel free to send me a heads up, ha... otherwise I guess I'll continue to experiment and see what happens.

[BadTertle]

Extract by default should be putting the extracted faces under its own transform node (making it a selectable object). I'd look at your extract settings (the option box) and make sure "separate extracted faces" is checked.

[BadTertle]

Originally posted by The Godfather:

"Separate" right above Extract seemed to do the trick... (I Think?)

Cool. I'd be careful with separate though, it will turn all shells into different objects, not just the ones you intended (the eyelashes will be separate too, etc). Just be aware of that going forward.

[Chronoloco]

Ha, I already removed the eyelashes because I didn't like them, so I just deleted them. (Because they were showing up as dark black in Maya) Someone posted something about the transparency setting in Maya would fix it, but I couldn't figure out what they were talking about, so I just deleted them. (If you happen to know exactly how to fix this issue, I'd be more than happy to try it out)

As for that box, you are 100% right. I actually manually UNCHECKED "Separate Extracted Faces" because for some reason I read that as "Do you want all of these individual faces to become their own objects?" And I said "No way!" So I unchecked it, so it sounds like I broke it by accident, ha... I'll try it again with that checked, instead of doing the separate.

[AqP]

Eyelashes are black in Blender too so it's not just a Maya thing.

[BadTertle]

Originally posted by AqP:

Eyelashes are black in Blender too so it's not just a Maya thing.

*I just opened up Blender for the first time Friday in my research to find a temporary Garrys mod import workflow, so I say this without real knowledge of the program*

A copy from the another thread--
The eyelash part of the diffuse texture has all black (or whatever color is chosen through the substance) and the alpha channel of the png contains the data to make most of it transparent. I'd check that transparency is hooked up in the maya shader and check with a render (the viewport in maya is not super accurate with alpha). --

I suspect that many programs might have this similar issue where its not taking the alpha channel from the diffuse by default. You may need to take the diffuse map into Gimp or photoshop and convert the alpha channel into a separate greyscale map. The data is there, it just may take some finessing to get it hooked up correctly in different programs.