Hello, I’m Epic Games’ Lead Technical Animator Jeremy Ernst and I’m excited to announce that the Animation and Rigging Toolkit has arrived on the Unreal Engine Marketplace. Previously, the toolkit and associated updates were included exclusively with our point releases, but providing it via the Marketplace now affords us greater flexibility in delivering updates and consistent versions.
The Animation and Rigging Toolkit (ART) is a suite of animation and rigging tools created for Autodesk Maya. These are the same tools that Epic uses on all of its projects, like Fortnite, Paragon, Unreal Tournament, and Robo Recall. The Animation and Rigging Toolkit is a comprehensive suite of tools that takes a character through skeleton creation, skeleton placement, rig creation, and final animation.
As you may know, this is the first product on the Marketplace that isn't actually directly tied to the engine in any way. As such, it is a bit of an experiment, and is currently listed as a code plugin. That comes with some quirks, like it requiring an engine version and having a button called "Install to Engine."
To be clear, ARTv1 does not actually require a specific engine version, so as long as you have one of the versions installed that it "supports", you can download the tools and use them with any engine version you wish. Regarding installing to engine, the tools will download into your engine/plugins/marketplace folder, but you can move them anywhere you like after they have been downloaded.
One of the awesome things the Marketplace gives us, especially in regards to code plugins, is the ability to easily update. Once a new build of the tools is published, you will be able to update from within the launcher.
Interested in utilizing the Animation and Rigging Toolkit? You can find it right now, right here inside the Unreal Engine Marketplace.