VR Hands not animated (not grabbing)

Hello guys, I’m new to UE4. I’m having trouble setting up the motion controller for a custom VR Hand. The Problem is, the VR Template hands are not grabbing (not animated). Here are a few screenshots. Hopefully someone can point out on how to set these up. Attached are a few screenshots.Thank you!

Those are some very weird looking hands.
Did you replace the original mesh?
Because this is how the mannequin hands should look like (atleast) in 4.18.3
http://puu.sh/A01On/f3ab259604.png

If you replaced the hands, then the problem might be the setup with your own custom made hands.
I know for sure that the mannequin hands in 4.18.3 with the VR template works, not sure in 4.19

Yes, I did replace the hands. The hand is supposed to look weird in my game. Basically, I just want to retarget the animation from the Original Animation to the custom hands.I think the template is the same in 4.19. Thank you!

i take it that you have skinned your custom mesh?
if you did maybe UE4 doesn’t yet know that it has to animate the hands, check for any references to the original mannequin.

Best way would be to look at a copy (with the original hands) and see how they made it work.

Also there’s enough tutorials on youtube on how animations work within UE4.

Hello. I managed to to retarget the animations from the original Hands template. It works well.
I might need to do some tweaks to my skinned mesh though.Thanks for the letting me know!

As far as I remember the VR template hand “animations” are not really animations, just blendspaces blending between two poses. In my opinion, it is just easier to reconstruct a similar blendspace with your hand mesh. Remember you can easily create poses by manipulating the bones to correct pose and save it as a one-frame animation. You can then use it I the blend space.

Very Cool! Thanks for pointing this out! As in Unity it requires the hands to be animated and was a bit more difficult to setup.Technically could I trigger different animations for the grab and trigger buttons then? How would I setup a Blueprint ? Could I use the original BP ?

no problem, mark your question as answered please.

Of course you can trigger different animations provided you create new blendspaces (which can be done ine a few minutes). You can even come up with new hand states if you extend the enumeration.

You can use the original character blueprint and the animation blueprint as they are in the template. If you want to create your own that is similar to the template, these are kind of like the high - level steps:

  1. create an enumerator with all the hand states (for example, open, closed (grab), point with index finger, show middle finger :smiley: , etc.
  2. Set the enumerator value in the character blueprint either on tick or event based. The template does it on tick so that the hand can react very quickly. So for example if the collision sphere parented to the hand mesh collides with anything “grabbable” it sets the “can grab” state.
  3. set up the blendspaces in the animation editor (and record new hand poses by manipuliting the transform of the bones)
  4. You set up a state machine transitioning between the blend spaces based on different criteria in the anim graph.
  5. you poll the enum variable in the anim blueprint.

It is easier to do than to write down! :slight_smile:
Good luck!