Retarget Existing Animations Without Duplicating

I am looking to fix some of our animations due to a rig gimballing error and I am trying to find a way to retarget and replace existing animations without duplicating and creating new ones. Only some of our animations need this retargeting done and so retargeting all the animations to a new skeleton is not really helpful to me. Is there a way to do this?

Thanks!

Hi Dylan,

You can select each desired animation individually and retarget to the desired skeleton verses selecting one skeleton and retargeting it to another, thus causing the duplication of all the animations associated with the original skeleton.

If you are not able to do this or this does not address your issue, please respond and we will investigate further.

Thanks,

Steve Hardister

Hello everybody
So I’m here for the same reason.
We need to retarget a lot of animations replacing the old ones (different skeletons). Doing this in Maya, as suggested, would take quite more time for the purpose of what we’re doing.

So, If you select a destination folder for the animations which contains an asset with the same name, then the tools simply adds a number at the end of the name without replacing the old asset.
To avoid this I’m saving the animations in a different folder, then I close UE, replace the asset in explorer and then UE again. A really dirty trick but at least is doing what’s necessary for now.

Is it possible to implement an options to override any existing asset with the same name in the destination folder using the retargeting tool? Keeping the previous asset options (root motions/notifiers/ecc) could also be a great addition.

Thank you for your time
Daniele

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Hi Steve, thanks for the response. I was hoping for a way to avoid duplicating the animation and retarget the existing anim asset to a different skeleton. Right now, for individual anims, the only option I can find is “duplicate anim asset and retarget” and I’d rather have just “retarget anim asset”. Is this possible?

Sorry for not getting back to you Steve, my problem revolved around the need to retarget a couple dozen animations that were already hooked up to state machines and montages, so simply duplicating and replacing would have been a bunch of work. That’s what I did though, short answer I guess it’s not possible to retarget without duplicating.

While I have not found an option to simply retarget the animation without duplicating, I have tested and have found that, after retargeting, you can delete the original animation so as not to include both animations in your project or final build. Does this not work for you?

if you’re just having to replace a few animations, is it better to retarget them in your DDC tool (Maya?) and just reimport them into unreal?
This is how we typically deal with these situations internally. We only retarget by duplicating when we’re creating a new character and we want to use template data to go faster.
Hope this helps.

No, it’s not. Mainly because it is not safe to do so, and no reason to retarget if animation is imported with that skeleton already. as Laurent mentioned, it should be fixed in DDC or you could use in-engine layer editing tool to fix it up.

Thanks,

–Lina,

You can have one animation “idle” for Skeleton A and a different animation “idle” (with the exact same name) for Skeleton B as long as they’re in different directories in the Content Browser and, subsequently, the Project Folder.

In order to be able to modify the retargeted animation (in this example, “idle”) from the DCC, on the fly, with UE4 open, designate the import source in the details panel of the anim asset.

Here is an illustration of the result:

At this point we have a modified “idle” animation for Skeleton B so that this specific/modified animation will be called for Skeleton B (in the State Machine, etc.) while maintaining the original “idle” animation for the original Skeleton A.

Thank you Steve for your time.
Unfortunately this is not what I meant.
I’ll try to explain better with an example:

I’ve 10 animations of an old Character, from a different project. I need to transfer these animations to a new char, using the UE retarget tool.
Cool, Base Pose done, retarget done, now I’ve 10 animations for a new character in a different folder(same old names).
But i just noticed that all these retargeted new animations have the hands rotated because I did a mistake with the BasePose.
Cool, get back to the base pose, fix it, retarget again the old animations to the same folder which now contains the first pass of those retargeted animations. Now, the tool doesn’t permit to overwrite files with the same name so instead of replacing the first pass of animations it simply creates a new asset with the same name + “1” at the end of the string. Having a “replace files with same name” checkbox or something similar would be great in this kind of situations.
Is this something that can be integrated to UE?

Thank you again!
Dan

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Thank you for the clarification. I’ve entered feature request UE-39130 to address this type of circumstance.

Let me know if you require any additional support for this issue,

Steve H.

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