I ditched the original knight model cause t sounded like it just wasn’t an ideal starting point, especially for someone new to animation like me.
I actually had a major break through last night and managed to get my knight girl to respond to Manny animations. I had to do a bit of manual editting of the model like deleting the sword mesh in blender and removing the side belt strap (I didnt want to risk AccuRig picking this up and scretching it). I also reduced the tris count to 200k (was 500k) then ran it through AccuRig (Thank you for this tool btw, huge time saver), and success! Knight girl was rigged.
I imported her manually and tried setting up the IK_Rig/Retargetter myself but I had no luck with animations working. Then because the skeleton match UE skeleton exactly now I tried using the auto-retarget options which created new IK_Rigs and Retargetters. I am still investigating what is actually different compared to when I import this same rigged model manually. From what I can tell, the only difference is mine didnt have IK goals which I dont see options to create the same goal type it created for me. From here I was able to run animations from my UE Manny as well as animations from the Greystone character once I created IK_Rigs/Retargetters for him.
I am going to test this rigged model against some other animations today.
There is a problem with the mesh coloration when I re-apply the materials the original asset came with, some research suggests this was caused from the decimation process I did in blender to reduce the tris count. Something about vertices base colors. Investigating this today as well.
One question I do have is:
because I have this newly rigged knight girl to the with UE skeleton, do I need copies of all the animations specificially for knight girl?
Or do I just need the IK_Rig/Retargetter for her then I can play animations in an AnimBlueprint with animations from the Manny?
I also tried swapping the knight girl skeletal mesh for the greystone one in my BP_PlayerCharacter just to see what happens and I get this odd distortion of the knight girl mesh. Something else I have to investigate.
