How to create a Root Bone for Catrig?

Hello everyone.

I am literally going mad trying to find out but so far I am unable to find out how to create a “Root Bone” for my character.

You see, Unreal 4 needs root bone to be exactly at 0,0,0 for proper use of root motion so I am not able to use my character’s pelvis as things starts to get nasty.

3dsmax’s Motion Extraction Node for Catrig, which is a bone with the purpose of doing exactly what I need, is COMPLETELY broken and I don’t know how I can make a seperate bone and set is as root bone.

I am really begging for help and trying to figure out the problem as we speak.

Please, anyone with a slightest clue, help me about how I can make a root bone for catrig.

Thank you very much for your time and reading!

This is my exact problem! Did you manage to add a root bone to your CAT rig?

Any update for someone having a similar issue?

I figured it out while doing a games jam a few months back. If you open the layer manager (it’s a few buttons over from transform tools) in 3ds max at the bottom where it says “Layer Explorer”, to the right of that, select “Sort By Hierarchy”.

http://i.imgur.com/jQ8Abz2.png (Diagram)

Now you need to locate the triangle base you get with all cat rigs, drag the pelvis and any other helpers (like feet platforms) onto that, this might require you to re-skin the model, so keep that in mind. I’d then advise renaming the triangle platform to “Root”, I don’t believe that’s important though.

Now, if you want to do an attack animation or anything that requires root motion, make sure to only move the root helper, when exporting your fbx as well, make sure to hit the “convert deforming dummies to bones” or the cat rig will be converted to a mesh.

Hope this helps.

Interesting, so I guess the idea is to use the triangle platform as the root node. I assume after adjusting the hierarchy, the triangle platform will then move the full rig with an active animation layer?

I have been very confused on how to set this up correctly, I first tried to add the extra bone from the pelvis but got some strange results.

For anyone else getting stuck on this, I did a search (google) and found this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xF7AK4UjMI

It covers how to setup and import Root Motion with a cat rig into UE4.

That’s what worked for me in the end. I too tried adding another bone like you did and had a similar issue. There’s likely far more video tutorials on this now (like the one superme just posted) but at the time (can’t believe it’s been almost two years, ■■■■) there wasn’t much out there for creating rigs for UE4 that use root motion.

I had tried this method and it worked for CATMotion animations, but when trying to add manual animations on an AbsLayer the rig broke (the pelvis and one leg got rotated 90 degrees for no reason). However the method described above to link the foot platforms and the pelvis onto the triangle worked perfectly, now I can even add one more point helper as a root and link the triangle there, so that I can use path constraint on the root and have thetriangle free to do offsets, or use other constraintsas well.