Hey there. I just bought Mixamo Fuse, and I’ve been creating a few characters for my game. I took them to Mixamo, do not add any animation, and just import them directly (as .fbx) to Unreal.
The character appears on a T-Pose, and I successfully added the character on my game blue-prints, When he walks (I’m using the top-down blueprint), he moves in a T-Pose.
Ok then, only needs to animate him. Now there lies my problem - I’m trying to use the base animations that came with the example by retargeting it on the skeleton that came with the character. However just the head moves o_O I think it’s because it only found the head when it retargets.
My question is, what should I read, what tutorials should I follow to understand this workflow?
the bones of the skeletons must have the same name, im also trying to figure a way to transfer animation between skeletons with different bone name, isit doable in 3ds max or maya?
I’m not an artist, but the easiest way I’ve found to do this sort of thing is to get Autodesk Motionbuilder, which supports retargeting animations between different skeletons really nicely.
What I wish was possible, though, is being able to rename bones in UE4 so that the built in retargeting can work better. Right now it seems like it would work pretty good, especially after tweaking to ignore extra bones (i.e., set them to Skeleton instead of Animation) but there doesn’t seem to be a way to do it.
I think the issue is more than the bone names, looking at it. UE4 doesn’t appear to do the same sort of retargeting as MotionBuilder.
In any case, I highly recommend MotionBuilder anyway, it’s great for working with FBX assets, and retargeting is really dang simple even between extremely different skeletons.
It basically just consists of a few simple steps in MB:
Create a skeleton definition. This just means selecting the bones of the character’s skeleton and assigning them to the generic slots (so MB has a generic name for the spine nodes and stuff, and you select which bone on your chara corresponds, then “assign” that bone to that slot). It automatically mirrors, too, so you only need to set up one side and the non-symmetric bones.
Create a control rig after the skeleton is made. This is actually just a matter of doing like “New Control Rig” and selecting FK/IK or IK only.
Repeat #1 and #2 for each different skeleton you plan to remap animations from or to.
I forget exactly how you do the retargeting itself (whether or not you open both MB rigs or not, etc.) but it’s fairly easy and basically you end up just telling the skeleton you’re remapping TO to use the FK/IK control rig for the animation from the other skeleton and it handles making sure that everything translates over right.
Export and you’re golden.
It seems involved but it’s actually quite fast. I’m not even an artist at ALL (programmer), so art tools like this are the last thing I find easy to use.
