Joint Orientation Forward Vector (LookAt)

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’ve modeled/rigged/animated a basic character in Maya. In UE4 I decided I wanted the characters head to follow the player. I setup everything up in the animation blueprint with no issues, however when I went to test it out, it seems the rotations on the joint are pointing in a very different direction, as when my player moves around, the character’s head twists around. I was able to fix this by adjusting the values after the lookat rotation is set, but this is not an optimal workflow.

I guess the root of my question probably has to do with how UE4 handles joint orientation. Does UE need joint orientation’s to be set in a specific manner, and if so, how should they be set? (aim axis,etc.)

Thanks!

2

The general rule of thumb is to orient the joint X-axis towards the next bone with Z-up Axis. For end bones, you can match the orientation of the previous parent or set it to worldspace 0,0,0 orientation.

Hope that helps =)

3

Also since you use Maya, here is a great script file I use for auto aligning my joint chains.

link text

4

Yeah, this is how I have been setting my joints up. Hmm, maybe the issue lies somewhere else…I’ll setup an extremely basic rig/character and see what the results are like with it.