thanks for the followup
Since the first post I had already followed all the steps of the documentation, and made sure every bone in the skeleton was matching their equivalents by the correct name (despite the difference in the hierarchy) - clavicle with clavicle, upper arm with upper arm, upper arm twist with upper arm twist, and so on for every bone in the Base and the Advanced configurations (so yes, even every finger).
just in case I just double-checked again and all the bones match.
what I didn’t try before was the part in the docs about the adjustments, setting the Translation Retargetting to Skeleton for those bones that were not matching. with this I was able to fix the problems caused by the differences in the hierarchy (yay!) which fixed most of the problems. the octopus arms are gone and the problems in the neck, waist and toes seem fixed.
the problem is now only about the rotation of the arms. when I retarget the walk animation it looks like this:
this problem is covered in -[this][2]- part of the documentation, and it would seem to solve my problem because my model is also rigged in an A pose. however like I described in my first post, adjusting the Retargetting Pose doesn’t change anything.
this is what my pose looks like:
as you see, it matches the T pose.
like I said before though, I can modify the pose to any crazy pose and it produces no visible changes. is this a bug?