I cannot export Professional Maya Rig to FBX because of multiple Errors. Why I pay license for Maya then!

[zizo6800]

Hello Maya Administrators & Support,

I am in international game project, our studio decided to export our Maya rigs that we created to FBX for Game engine & 3ds Max use. Whenever I export the Rig to FBX. I face multiple errors:

1st Error:  Unsupported Operation on Mesh Vertices:

The plug-in has detected mesh nodes with unsupported operators that affect the vertex and/or face count. To correct this, delete the Non-deformer history before exporting. The following nodes will not be processed.

2nd Error: Unsupported transform node with multiple shape node (3)

This scene contains at least one transform node with multiple shape nodes. The plug-in will export only one of the shape nodes.

For error 1, I searched in the forum and everywhere on internet they said to delete non-deformer history but that didn't fix any.

For error 2, on internet they said to transform nurbs to polygons, I did but the operation doesn't work and says error.

My colleague in the game, created his Rig with blender and he was able to export it without a single error. I don't know what is the advantage then of Maya if the free program Blender can export perfectly the rig with its controllers.

I need a help and a solution urgently since there is no time for delay as it is international game will be release on PS5.

Thank you in advance.

[Kahylan · Accepted solution]

Hi!

So for your question:

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My colleague in the game, created his Rig with blender and he was able to export it without a single error. I don't know what is the advantage then of Maya if the free program Blender can export perfectly the rig with its controllers.

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If you don't animate your rigs in the 3D DDC that they were made in, but rather go to 3DS Max or the game engine, for animation. Then there is no advantage in using Maya over any other 3D Software like Blender or Cinema 4D, those 3D Programs all work so differently that any ported rig with more than the minimum needed functionalities will not work well. My advice if you plan to animate in Max, would be to do your rigs in Max.

If you plan to do the animation in Maya, the program has a lot of upsides and downsides compared to the other 3D Programs. Mayas approach to rigging is so called "non-restricited workflow" this means that you can mix and match any types of node, as long as the math of what you want to do checks out, it will work. This leads to tons of interesting rigs and approaches to different problems. On the downside, if you don't know what you are doing, there are also a ton of creative ways in which you can destroy your rig.

Compared to that other 3D Programs like Blender or Cinema 4D are more restricted in order to be more user friendly. Meaning that they only allow certain operations on certain types of objects. It is a lot harder to do stuff like adding multipliers to your constraints, or driving your animation from the R value of a texture. With the upside that the rigs are more uniform, also most users can't do as many things that might go wrong when exporting into packaging format like FBX...

What program is right for you depends on what projects you work on and how you like to work. For a game project, where the final software in the pipeline is very limited, there aren't all too many differences.

Now that this question is out of the way, how could you fix your issues:

Nr.1 This is an issue that most commonly pops up if you still have tweek nodes on your mesh, meaning nodes that will change the polygon count, also with nodes created from mesh cleanup or combining different meshes.
This is why it is very important to always clear the history on all your meshes before you start rigging.

Similar Errors can also show up if you have a Deformer on your Mesh that isn't supported by the FBX format. As far as I know FBX only supports Skinclusters, Blenshapes and to some extent lattice deformers. Meaning that any non-linear deformers, sculpt deformers, etc are not supported and need to be baked into blendshapes before the export.

If you still have tweeknodes on your rig that don't get deleted when you run  "delete non-deformer history" you would have to manually take them out of the node tree and delete them.

Nr.2 its hard to say what causes this issue without seing your scene. In most cases it is caused by the controllers, since some rigs will have multiple curve shapes under a single transform to create some crazy looking controllers. But it could also be caused if you have multiple meshShape nodes under one transform instead of having them properly combined.

A way to easily identify this problem, is to write a script that checks all transform nodes, like this script that will print out all transforms with multiple shapes:

import maya.cmds as mc

allTransforms = mc.ls(type = "transform")

for t in allTransforms:
    shapes = mc.listRelatives(t, s= True) or []
    if len(shapes)>1:
        print("{0} has multiple shapenodes".format(t))

then for nurbs curves you can just redraw the shapes using the EP curve tool and replacing the multiple shapes with the redrawn shape. With mesh shapes I would unparent some of the shapes to give them their on tranforms.

I hope it helps!

[zizo6800]

Thank you so much for the detailed information.

I made complex shapes for the controllers actually. I think I will have to redo the shapes again. but other program export complex shapes right away, but I don't know why Maya doesn't like to make it easy for us.

Thank you for your help!