I made some animations and tried to import them into my game. However, they appear much smaller than I would like them to be. Turning on root motion appears to fix this, but the animation that I actually need root motion for does not move nearly as much as it should. Can someone please explain why this happened and what I can do to fix it?
After some experimenting, I realized that UE4 scales your skeleton by 100 times its size. Here was my work around, but keep in mind that I was using Blender. I’m not sure what the method would be for other software:
- If you haven’t applied the scale on the armature of your animations already, you might want to copy it down from the number panel (n), especially if your animation involves changing the location of some bones.
- Apply the scale to your skeletal mesh and all of the animations.
- If the animations look weird, this is where the copied location comes into play. Otherwise, you can skip this. Go into pose mode, select a messed up bone, and multiply its location (on all axes) by the number you copied. This should make it return to the position it was before you applied the scale. Do this for every bone that got messed up and for every key frame.
- Change the scale of your skeletal mesh to .01 and export it. Export the animations without any changes to the scale.
Importing these files will give you a skeleton and animations with the same scale regardless of whether or not you use root motion. They will still appear tiny by default in the preview on each of their files, but scaling up the skeletal mesh in my character’s BP has given me no problems.