[BUG] Animation retargeting broken in 4.15

Animation retargeting in Unreal Engine 4.14.3 worked just fine. I recently upgraded to 4.15 and found that retargeting animation between different characters works with a minor issue.

ONLY the thumb_03_l bone’s rotation is not proper when retargeting animation in UE 4.15

I have checked this several times and followed exact same steps as described here : Retarget Manager in Unreal Engine | Unreal Engine 5.1 Documentation

For now I am sticking with Unreal Engine 4.14.3 for my production use.

Hey Monu29,

Is the mannequin your base ? What is the target ? It would help if you could send me your target and tell me what animations you’re trying to retarget. You can PM me a download link on the forums. Even if it is marketplace content, I’d like you to send me your files.

Hi ,

I have sent you a link for the source and target characters with animation to reproduce the issue.

Hi Monu29,

I’m not seeing the left thumb show this behavior in either version. However, the right thumb shows distortion in both 4.14 and 4.15.

I looked a little bit closer and it looks like this is more of an issue with the fact that your two skeletons handle the structure of the hands differently. The fact that the two base poses for the hands are so different can be a big issue, but not impossible to overcome.

It appears that you haven’t really modified any of the Translation Retargeting Options for your target character either. You can activate them here in the Tree:

You’ll likely need to modify the thumb to go Animation, , for Thumb_01, Thumb_02, and Thumb_03 (respectively).

Our [retargeting documentation][2] can help with the rest. This is an accompanying doc to the one you were using.

Hi ,

Thanks for your time & effort to reproduce the issue on your side.
I did follow UE4’s official documentation on retargeting.

In my case i found the and as I mentioned in the original question that **ONLY thumb_03_l ** shows weird behavior. So it’s the left thumb in my case.

Yes I do use the exact same retargeting options as you are telling.

Still I’ll once again test with different animations that are for UE4’s mannequin and see if the problem still persists. I will post an update tomorrow.

Just to note, I was looking at the left thumb and did not see the same problems that you’re seeing. My screenshot just happened to show me manipulating the right thumb.

I was noting at the beginning of my post that I saw nothing wrong with the left thumb, but saw a bunch of retargeting issues with the right thumb.