Thank you so much for the quick reply! i went into the max file of your rig and set the unit scale from inches to centimeters and it worked! i tested it against my model and some MB animations and its the right size 
if you don’t mind one more question the various dummy markers on the rig (ik on the fingers i think?) when i pose the biped to my model which isn’t the exact proportions of the epic model will it matter that they are not lined up they way they were before since i cant get them to move with the biped? thanks again!
Just to make sure. Did you reproportion the biped from my rig in that shot?..
Are you talking about the light blue boxes?. Those are actually not ik markers, they are the underlying skeleton for Epic’s character. The biped simply drives that skeleton.
The way I set that up is for the biped to just be a control rig and not meant to be exported or used for skinning or anything like that.
Yes that is the resized version all in proportion now, i was referring to the white controllers that you can see above the arms though i realized in short order that it is not the biped that makes up the skeleton but the dummies you set up, my origional problem was i was trying to set up root motion in udk and realized that my biped rig does not have the required root bone at 0,0,0 and so after a lot of searching i found this and thought i could use it as my rig since i didn’t want to have to re-rig and re-learn how to make a rig that would give me what i wanted. This proved to not be the case lol
Yeah, these 2 rigs, the blue guy and the grey guy, they are very specific to those skeleton scale and proportions, they won’t be easily modifiable. It would in fact be easier to create one from scratch for your character.
The best thing to do is to build a custom skeleton, exactly on top of the biped rig. So, make sure the biped is exactly what you need for your character, fit to your character and then create some bones in the same places as the biped bones. This allows you to have the necessary setup for root motion without messing with biped. But it still allows you to animate with biped and use motion capture and all that stuff. That is the reason I created these rigs the way I did. It is also the way I use my own character rig for my game.
Generally when people think about doing this with low or no rigging experience, the first thought is always that it would be really time consuming and hard work, but in fact it’s pretty quick and easy to do. You only need to know a few things, how to place and edit bones, how to align objects and how to constrain objects… and that’s it. And the rig you end up with is much easier to deal with, with regards to adding special case things. Biped is good to work with and is a nice self contained system with pretty powerful features, but it does not like to be customized beyond what it gives you in it’s settings. So creating your own skeleton, allow you for custom things like root bone, proper twist bones… etc… without dealing with biped’s hard coded stuff.
Thank you very much for the good advice!
Thank you thank you thank you!! This has saved me so much time and stress <3
Hey Ohihb!
This thread is long dormant but I am in need of some assistance. I know close to nothing about using 3dsMax but I found your “grey guy” biped rig here a while back. I’m having some issues using it in Unreal with the animation blending, and I was hoping you might no what’s going wrong.
The animations export fine, and at first they appear to be exactly what I want. HOWEVER, when I attempt to put these animations into my animation graph, the result is strange.
When the animation nears completion and begins to blend into the next animation in the state machine, animation A blends into animation B the wrong way. As an example, I have a simple animation where the character swings a bat. After the Bat Swing, the character returns to the Idle animation. The Bat Swing is a full animation, so at the end of the animation, the character is just about reset at the Idle position anyway. The problem is that when the blend occurs, for some reason, Unreal is blending the spine all the way back around to return to the Idle animation. Instead of a seamless blend between two simple animations, the result is a frightening “exorcist” effect where the character’s upper body spins nearly 360 degrees in the wrong direction to return to the Idle animation.
This issue is not ideal, obviously, because in order to patch it up I’ve had to reduce the blend duration on all of the affected animations to .001. So at that point, the animations just snap into position and might as well not be blending at all. Additionally, the super-short blend duration is causing (I think) my state machine transition rules to be skipped which is also less than ideal.
I am experiencing this problem with all of the animations that I have exported using your “grey guy” 3dsMax biped. I’m not very experienced with 3dsMax so it’s very possible that there is an issue in the way that I am exporting the fbx. However, seeing as the animation behaves almost perfectly despite this one issue, I wonder if there is a way to remedy it in Persona. Thanks for any help!
This is one of those things where I’d just need more information. My first thought is that it’s a problem in UE4, and though tracking down problems is best done linearly, follow the steps from begin to end, I just can’t think of any exporting issue that would cause this, and if it did, it would certainly be new to me. With that said, the only thing I can even think that it possibly could be is the blend type. But yeah, otherwise I really don’t know.
So the best I can do is to either ask you to post more info about your UE4 setup, as much as you can or willing to share, AnimBP… etc. or send me a PM and then we can deal with it more privately so I’d ask if you can send me your actual files, anything included for the UE4 stuff to work. You can Migrate just that stuff, the bare minimum to a clean project and send me that.
If it’s something simple, then some screen shots of your setup can usually reveal the problem but otherwise it’s very time consuming to go back and forth on what it COULD be. I’ve never had this problem myself, so I can’t say where to look or what not to do… you know.
Sorry I can’t provide a more useful answer, but I’m willing to try work it out with you if you want to, but I probably would need to get my hands on your UE4 project, even just in a bare form just to see what’s going on. Unless you’d rather go through Answerhub and see if people have had similar problems. I’ll leave you the choice…
Hi Obihb for this useful mesh you built here. I’m not very experienced in rigging or animation and I have a question for you: is it possible for the parenting between the biped and the UE4 guy skeleton to be bi-directional? I mean the biped driving the skeleton and the skeleton driving the biped.
I’ve tried to load animations directly exported from the UE4 engine to the mesh, and it seems they just apply to the skeleton only and the biped doesn’t move with them.
I’m using the grey guy file.
Thanks.
thank you for sharing
There is no such way to have a bidirectional control between biped and any export rig for a few reasons:
1- Technically it would be impossible as it would create a cyclic redundancy loop.
2 - The point of the export rig is not to be touched at all but just be exported from Max into UE, instead biped/or custom rig setup is the only one rig you need to be concerned with when animating exporting/importing motions.
3 - you can’t simply export fbx motion file and try to load it in Max on the export rig, as that would break your original rig setup. The FBX file must be converted to a BVH/BIP file compatible with Max’s Biped before loading it onto Biped which would drive back the export rig. Converting FBX files into proper motion files may require a long setup on its own, You may want to look into scripts for that, but to my knowledge it is not a straight forward setup with a biped rig. If it was a custom rig it may be a bit simpler but still you will need good long workflow relatively to convert each FBX and make sure the motions are somewhat intact.
I’m not sure I would see a reason why you would wish to bring an animation from UE to max though, unless you have a motion pack such as (animset) and you wish to use some of those FBX files in Max to drive the motion. In that case the workaround is to manually re-animate and rotoscope the FBX imported into max with the biped for each motion.
Thanks for the info, ** K**
Yeah. The goal would be to add mannequin animations (idle, fire, walk, etc) and then animate over them with a control rig (preserving the original idle animation for example, but adding some other keyframes to it), adapting them to my meshes (weapons - pickups) and motion for every situation I need. But I guess I will have to find another workflow for that.
Thanks for the info, anyway.
I’m working a small team without professional animators. I’m using your rigging of the grey guy for Biped. It works great except that we’d like to move the root bone freely (independently from pelvis), even on XY. The reason for that is that we’re kind of a parkour game where we have many special requirements for the root bone. How could we move the root bone freely? or is it a NO for Biped?
Thanks.
I have to try remember what I did on there…
I think I would have added a dummy or point object or whatever because Biped doesn’t really allow a root bone setup by itself. In that case it’ll be a matter of removing the controllers for the XY of the root dummy. I might have also locked it so you can’t move it manually. The control there should be done through Wire Parameters. So if you select that dummy and go to the Wire Parameters you should find it’s linked probably to the pelvis. Just break that link and check if the movement is locked otherwise and unlock it. Then you should have just normal control over the dummy.
Sorry I can’t be more specific. If you have any rigging knowledge you might already know what I’m talking about, if not, maybe ask someone that does and use Max and can look into it for you. I don’t use Max anymore. i’m in Blender these days, so yeah, these old stuff I did is kind of just in my memory, which is real bad…
Forgot to mention that, if I did not use Wire Parameters, then it would have to be just a position controller, can’t remember the name, but an actual controller. There’s basically 2 ways I did stuff like this and it’s either Wire Parameters or Controllers. In either one you just need to break the “link”. With Wire Parameters you literally break the link but with controllers you replace the controller with XYZ Location… or something like that, the default one that allows you to move things by hand.
I guess what you can also do is you can simply delete the dummy and replace it with a new one and then link the original “Epic” imported bone to your new dummy. Then it should just work also I think. The key thing is controlling the original bone, so don’t “link” it but use a controller to drive it, either a link controller or a position controller and if you need rotation, also a orientation controller. But I think using a link controller should do it. sorry, again my memory is a little fuzzy and I don’t wanna give the wrong info. But those are the things you can use… you know.
Obihb - Thanks for sharing - this was a big help and works great.
You mentioned you are using Blender now…do they have anything like CAT or Biped for Blender?
eg. Easy to use rig with full-body ik, parametric locomotion, etc…
Most importantly, are you able to easily export to the Epic Mannequin?
Thanks for any feedback - considering where to invest time and money…
Cool, I’m glad you got it sorted out.
Yeah, so Blender, I’m still new there, I’m learning it as I go. I’ve done a few rigs trying to basically replicate my typical Max workflow. Funny enough I don’t typically use Biped or CAT, or rather, didn’t used to. As far as stuff like Biped or CAT for Blender, I actually don’t know but I kinda doubt it. I know there’s a thing called Rigify to help with a rig but I don’t know if it includes all sorts of other tools like you get with CAT and Biped. I haven’t actually looked at that just yet because it doesn’t teach me anything. I like to know the nuts and bolts of things first. Auto tools is only a possible time saver but doesn’t teach you anything.
So anyway, I’m going through some various things doing rigs and trying things. Basically I would know what I want to do and try find if Blender can do it and if not how to do something similar. So it’s a different way of learning the software, starting off with knowledge of what to do just find how to do it, not also learning what to do. If that makes sense… But to be honest you can do a lot that Max can do in regards to rigs, I mean custom rigs which is actually what I would typically do.
Exporting stuff from Blender to UE4 specifically for the mannequin will of course be possible in the same way it is with Max. Import into Blender, rig it and then animate and export it. I haven’t actually done that for the mannequin but I have for my own game character. Using my old FBX exports to make it work. As long as you know what you’re doing there’s nothing preventing you from doing it in the software, you know?.
I think someone did a mannequin rig for Blender. but yeah, I’m not sure. I of course haven’t looked at it so if it exists, I have no idea how it works. But to be honest it wouldn’t be any harder in Blender to make a custom rig for it.
I’ve seen a lot of stuff with Blender where some people have problems with various things for various reasons but as long as the tools work, meaning the exporter does it’s job, the importer does it’s job, there’s probably nothing you can’t do. You just need to know why something doesn’t work, if it didn’t end up working and then fix it, you know?.
As investment, of course Blender is free so it’s only a time investment.
Anyway, before I start to ramble… too late… but yeah… that’s some Blender stuff…
Thanks a lot for these rigs. I was wondering if you happen to also have a CATRig for the grey guy? I only see a biped version and would definitely rather use CAT. If not I’ll probably just try rebuilding the rig in CAT but obviously would rather not have to do that
I’m sorry, I never made a CAT Rig for the grey guy. I actually stopped using Max all together over a year ago so there’s no chance I’ll ever make one either. Sorry.