Animation broken when changing skeletal mesh having same rig/skeleton

A while ago, I rigged my “Arms” mesh to the ue4 Skeleton (same number of bones/ same layout/name convention). After that I created my animations using that mesh. In unreal I imported the mannequin and assigned my skeleton. Seeing that the bind pose looked right for both my mesh and the unreal mannequin, I didn’t think there will be any problems when switching the mesh.
The problem I have now is this: The “arms” mesh can’t play default mannequin animations( ex: third person running) and the Mannequin can’t play the arms animations without heavy distortion.
I’m thinking that the problem is the way I rigged it, since the bind poses of my arms/ unreal skeleton are different because I modified the location and also the rotation / orientation of the joints. I didn’t know much about rigging when I did this, so the axis don’t match.

I tried:

  1. changing the retargeting options for the bones, but no option fixed this;
  2. reimporting the animations to the default skeleton, but I got the same result;
  3. modifying the arms rig to match the default orientation of joints, this resulted in my animations looking distorted on both meshes.
    Does anyone know a way to fix this that doesn’t involve redoing the animations?
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Hi there,

Bone orientation is critical to get good animation retargeting. What you can try to do is fix your animations using control rig, then you bake it into a new animation sequence afterwards.

If you’re using UE4.27, you can create a project from Control Rig sample and go from there.

Here is a chapter from the official animation course.
Creating a Control Rig for the Stylized Character Kit - In-Engine Animation for Virtual Production (epicgames.com)

Tutorial: Control rig: Edit animations - Unreal Engine 4 + Unreal Engine 5 - YouTube

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