Run into an animation warping mesh issue when animating my rig.

I’ve targeted the commander in the a-pose with the epic mannequin rig in the same pose and targeting was successful, the animations all work but there is an issue going on with his mesh deforming the body as soon as he gets animated, the mesh goes out of the proper body shape.

I only have to look in the skeleton editor to see what the issue could be.

https://i.imgbox.com/QzwLjtrZ.png

From this picture from the skeleton editor I suspect that the deformation is being caused because of missing bones in his Skeleton because there’s only two bones in his arms and in his legs. Hes missing the twist arm bones and the calf twist bones and without them its not enough to get his body mesh into the correct animated natural human shape.

So I gave him to my modeler friend to put in the missing twist bones for me but she is unable to fix
his rig up with Blender because she knows all about Blender but not about Unreal Engine
and because blender has a problem transitioning between the rigs, so I have to come on
here for help to those riggers in here who know how to correct this particular issue to fix up his body.

Why not post an image of the weights?

Is this the option you are talking about in Unreal Engine?, under Show Selected Bone Weights?
here’s a screenshot.

and as for that extra bone ends on the fingers, that was the result of what blender did to the rig after I deleted those extra end bones off his hands. (as they are greyed out).

His second issue is Eye Yi Yi !! His eyeballs are not sitting firm in their sockets during Anim
and this shows up as soon as he gets animated. I tried to join them to Mesh in blender
before exporting out, but they still float up around his head in Unreal Engine and it looks
rather creepy. Maybe I missed something in the Import settings.

The second issue he has

how can we prevent a floating eyeball issue? So that he imports into unreal engine not only with his
eyes intact but they also stay in his head when hes animated…

Looks like the eyeballs are unweighted so are just hanging in their default positions. In Blender, select the eyes and add them to the head’s vertex group with a weight of 1.0.

Most of your issues seem to be down to iffy weights and not using the right settings for FBX export. My export settings, which serve pretty well, are as follows:

Main Tab:

  • -Y forward, Z up
  • Armature and Mesh selected for export only
  • “Selected Objects” ticked so I only export what I have selected from the scene

Geometries:

  • Everything unchecked
  • Smoothing: Edge

Armatures:

  • Add leaf bones unchecked (having this checked is probably what’s adding more bones to your skeleton)
  • Primary bone axis: Y
  • Secondary bone axis: X
  • Armature FBXNode type: Null
  • “Only deform bones” checked if I’m using a rig with a lot of control bones. Unchecked if I’m using the Epic rig (as it has a few bones that don’t deform that you DO want to export)

Animation:

  • EVERYTHING checked
  • Sampling rate and simplify set to 1.00

I can’t guarantee ALL of these settings will suit you or even if they’re 100% correct, but they’re the best I’ve managed to figure out with a little trial and error. The bone axes, for example, deserve a little experimenting to see if there’s a better setup for them, but what it’s set to right now seems to work okay.

No can do, The Eyeballs were already joined (CTRL J) to the main body mesh before exporting it out to Unreal Engine so I can’t select the eyes to weight and put them into the head vertex group because when i load the rig and select in object mode, it selects the whole body mesh. So I can’t select the eyes and there’s no eye vertex group as I checked the list. So it looks like I have to load an older rig of him to try to get the separate eye group otherwise i can’t weight his eyes.

I think it dissolved the group

Facing the same issue here :slight_smile:

Listening to Affirmation mp3 helps reduce Stress

You can do Select Linked in edit mode and select the eyes that way. For me it’s Ctrl+A but I don’t know if that is a custom hotkey or not.

I would use the UE4tools rig instead because that way you can guarantee your animations will look good as long as you edit the mesh to fit the rig.

Ok where do I get this ue4tools rig plugin? For I have rigify.

I hit CTRL-L in edit mode to select both the eyes, then hit assign with a weight of 1 to the head vertex group. Then I selected the mesh and the Armature then exported it out to Unreal Engine, in the Skeleton editor his eyes appear like normal, so far so good, then soon as I Retargeted him to one of the epic animations. Jump Anim, he was jumping just fine but his eyes were suspended up in space
and not animating along with the commander to stay put in his head. Hmmm. Didn’t Unreal get the new data from Blender when i assigned the eyes to his head? Suggestions? Then when i clicked into his Physics Asset to simulate him, his eyeballs fell straight out of his head during the collapse of his mesh.

ISSUE #2: Warped, Buckled Body Mesh animations after retargeting from the
epic skeleton’s animations.

i think I already know what his main trouble is.

The person who had rigged up my commander didn’t rig him up properly and that’s why I’m having
issues with the mesh with the retargeting. The retargeting can’t can’t work properly on the bones if there are bones missing from the skeleton hireachy.

So when I check both rigs.

I find The Epic Rig has got six bones in the arm, while my commander has only Four, and the
epic rig has five bones in the leg, while my commander only got three.

No wonder there are mesh problems in the animations. The mesh weighting can’t work
properly if all of the bones in the skeleton are not present in the same hireachy.

I don’t recommend using Rigify. It’s chiefly intended for Blender work only and doesn’t export well to game engines without some heavy modification. Even when you do get it into Unreal, it’s a royal pain to do any sort of IK or additive animations with it. Save yourself the hassle and use the epic rig instead. You can modify that to get what you want.

Second, you CAN weight the eyes. You need to be in edit mode, not object mode, where you can select individual mesh elements. You simply select part of each eye (shift-right click lets you multi-select) and hit CTRL-L to select all linked geometry, which should select the rest of the eyes. Then just go to the mesh data tab on the right, find the head vertex group in the list, and hit the “Assign” button.

Also, useful link, here’s the unofficial UE4 toolkit for Blender.

Blender was indeed causing his warping mesh. Apparently Blender has got a very nasty bug in it that when you go into armature mode, if you go into the object mode the bug then gets triggered IF you move or touch any of the bones when in the object mode… So it is possible to rig in Blender
but only if you can avoid setting off this annoying bug.

I put the commander’s mesh through Mixamo’s online rigger and soon found that service rigs no
root bones to the animations, so I added in the missing root bone in blender to his anim, avoided the dreaded bones orientation bug in blender and hes now fixed.

Now the second challenge, how to rig a Jeep so the commander can drive around in it, I have the
blueprint code for the jeep, but I need a rigged jeep with wheels that work.

I got the jeep, but I don’t know how to rig vehicles yet.