IK Animation and default Epic animation issue

Hey all,

I have created animations using Epic’s ART toolset plugin for Maya but am having trouble once I import it into the editor and try and blend them with the original animations like the idle or running animations.

Video of Issue

It looks like the idle, walk, run and jump that are included do not have the skeleton IK moving and when I used it in my own animation it has a strange blend between the two. This seems to be causing the dipping seen in the video.

What should I be doing to correct this? Is there a setting I need to turn on or off in the exporter from Maya? Or is there a way to bake down the IK animations to FK before I export?

EDIT: Thank you to Epic for getting back to me on this! The issue doesn’t have to really do with the IK and is caused by the root bone rotation bug in the default animations. Check it out below. And thanks to the community I have a quick work around another member put together and posted here:

Animation Issue Forum Post

So far what I have found within the ART Tools is that “Matching” should do this for me, converting all keyframes from IK to FK. However, it seems like this feature is currently broken(?). Not sure if it has worked with anyone else but at this time it causes the pole vectors and rotations to flip around wildly.

Does anyone know a better way to create animations with the IK rig and get them into the engine properly? Am I missing some work flow?

Hi GPM,

Thank you for pointing out the discrepancy between the default skeleton and it’s animations. It turns out that, in the default skeleton, the root bone is rotated Zup/Yforward. In the default animations, the root bone is rotated Z forward/Ydown resulting in the linked IK’s rotating with it. (Note that if you were to rotate the root in the default animations back so Z was up and Y was pointing forward, the linked IK’s would rotate with the root so that the hand IK’s aligned with the hands and the feet IK’s aligned with the feet *See image below:)

I have reported this as JIRA [UE-21242]. When this issue has been resolved, we will update this post.

Thanks.

Thank you for the response! I eventually found others with the issue in the animation but didn’t realize the rotation was the issue for a while. I kept thinking it was something I did with IK in Maya. I’ll add a note in for others and send them to where I found a work around!

Thanks for the help!