I have 27 different ai characters in my game, each with 5 different skeletal meshes (different outfits). I have imported animations for each of the 135 skeletal meshes, and I have created an animation blueprint (including Idle/Walk/Run and swimming/swimming idle 2d blendspaces) for the first character. I can retarget the animation blueprint fine for each different character - then swap the anims in the blendspaces with each characters’ own anims. Although this works it is a bit of a pain to have to swap all the anims manually in each characters’ blendspaces.
I noticed the new option to ‘Allow remapping to existing assets’ and thought I’d give it a try. When I ask it to guess the equivalent assets (anims) it finds the correct ones without any problems. I then press OK and confirm retarget - then UE4 crashes. This seems to happen consistently when this option is selected.
It is of note that although I know all my rigs are the same for each character, and it is only the meshes that are different - I do have to uncheck the ‘Show only compatible skeletons’ box.
I hope this is something silly that I have forgotten to do as the use of this functionality potentially would save me a lot of time!
Fairly new to the animation side of things and yes I am using individual skeletons for the skeletal meshes. I have just tried on a different test project and seen that I could have just used one (although still require character individual anim blueprints), oops! The reason I did this was that all the character rigs had facial morphs and whenever I tried using another characters’ animations I would get deformities on the face (eg eyes sticking out the side of head etc!).
I wasn’t sure whether this was morph related or skeletal as was aware that the orig character meshes had facial bones too. For this reason (I prob should have tested more thoroughly) I tried to keep everything character specific including the skeletons to avoid headaches.
I have been exporting from Iclone 6 and have a set of animations (same movement ones but various idle ones with facial anims spread across the characters) that I have exported for each char and each is set up to its own and anim blueprint with blendspaces. As I only use 4 chars at any one time I have 4 ai blueprints each set to spawn the respective mesh and anim blueprint from arrays.
This whole project is more of a learning experience for me so happy to make a few mistakes along the way! Have just been learning C++ for the last year, and find blueprints a great way to visually put it in practice without worrying about my many syntax errors!
So yeah, as you’re discovering, there are certain things that are linked specifically to the skeletal mesh and not the (i.e. morph targets). If the characters are generic enough, you should also be able to use the same AnimBP across all of them (as long as you use the same . I’m not sure if you’re using the morphs to create variety in your characters or if it’s for facial animation in particular, but you can create morph targets for each skeletal mesh, then as long as they’re named the same, those animations should translate smoothly from one mesh to another.
Huh, I’d never heard of Iclone before this. Anyways, there are a lot of creative ways to minimize your count, but that many skeletons, if you ever had to create a crowd of them, would tank your performance.
Keep on experimenting and you’ll get a feel for it.