Trouble retargetting animation

Hi,
I was wondering if someone could help me fix my issue in retarggeting issue ? I have followed many youtube videos and the animation always warps my mesh and also makes it huge (see approx size in viewport). I am just using the free anim pack starter on the marketplace.

Thanks
Ben

Hi bennetherwood,

It’s a little hard to tell what’s going on in the images above other than the Approx size being huge in the viewport… I understand you are using the free Animation Starter Pack. Where is your mesh from? Is this a custom mesh? What program did you create it in?

I suggest exporting the UE4_Mannequin (On skeletal mesh, right-click export) and import it into the same project your custom mesh is in to get a size comparison. Then scale your mesh to match the UE4_Mannequin approximately.

Also make sure your character is set to Z up and that joints are oriented in the same direction as the Mannequins. -When you re-target if your bones are oriented in different directions, this could cause the animation distortions you are seeing.

However, the most important step of retargetting is to make sure you open the Retarget Manager and Select the Humanoid Rig for both your skeletal mesh and the UE4_Mannequin for the animation starter pack… Then in the Retarget Manager for your character, map the bones to the bones of the humanoid rig.

Get started with this and let me know if you need further assistance.

-.

Thanks , I realised that the joints were in different orientations.

Hi , I imported the Ue4 skeleton and painted my mesh weights. The result is better but still not perfect. Could you have a go/look at my skel mesh ?
Thanks
Ben

108414-ue4.png

Judging from your image, it looks like the orientation of the bones in your original are significantly different from the rotation of the bones in the UE4 Character. However, there may be something else going on… If you want, you can send post a link to the zip file of the original fbx from Dropbox or Google drive.

If you do not want to post it publicly, you can send the link to me in a private message on our .

I looked at the FBX you provided in Maya. There was a small mesh included that may be causing issues. See images:

In addition to the extra mesh there were a lot of odd settings that should be resolved:

  1. Detached skin from skeleton: Skin/mesh is locked in position: Unlock Skin and Freeze transformation so rotation is at 0 and scale is 1
  2. Skeleton is keyed at frame 0: Deleted keyed frame
  3. Joints are rotated in scaled in odd positions: Freeze Transformations so all rotations are 0 and scaled at 1.
  4. Rebind Skin and export as FBX to test

*Also this mesh had no head nor joints for a head as in your original picture. Is this intended? Where did you get this mesh?

Hi ,
mesh is royalty free and head is being done separately. I’m not 100% sure what to do in 3ds max, i made the mesh following a tutorial. How do I do steps 1 and 3? also I couldn’t find a key at 0 ? I believe I have detached mesh by exporting skin envelopes (for re import later) and then deleting skin modifier but Im now unsure and this isnt really googleable.

Thanks
Ben

Hi Ben

I’ve had a chance now to have some team members look at this in 3DSMax and they see almost the same issues as when the fbx is imported into to Maya. First the scale of the character is extremely high, it should be to scale of the morphed skin in my first image above.

You will definitely need to scale down the character, detach the skin, and re-skin the character because there are skin weight issues and because the character is so large that, when rotating bones in UE4, the bones are not rotating at a 1:1 ratio.

So you can either fix this yourself; There are plenty of free online resources for how to 1. Use proper scaling for UE4 and 2. Skin your character for animation in 3DSMax.

…Or you can ask for support from the creator of the asset or a refund because the original file (if that’s the one you have provided) is out of scale and is missing skin weights on the arm.

.