I’m getting some odd deformation with animations on a particular rig that seem fine outside of Unreal (Mixamo animation previews and when importing the same files to 3DSMax), in particular with the legs. Is there something I’m missing here with setting up the skeleton in Unreal?
It’s a Daz3d Genesis model with some Mixamo animations, using the standard Genesis rig rather than a Mixamo auto rig.
3DSMax:
UE4:
After some more research into this this I managed to replicate the way the animation plays in UE4 in something else, MotionBuilder. In this after mapping the skeleton components to the format it expects, I found the rig has nothing for me to add for the Roll sections for the bones (what I guess would be equivalents of thigh_twist_01_l, thigh_twist_01_r etc on the UE4 Mannequin). Does anyone know if this is something UE is likely to have problems with, and if so can anyone suggest where I start looking for a way around it?
As I’m sure you can tell I’m pretty new to the rigging/animation side of things, my background is much more in coding, so any suggestions on where to go from here would be much appreciated!
Which version of Genesis? Anything below 3 is not worth the effort.
OK the Mixamo animations is 100% compatible with MotionBuilder so you could import the animations into MB and attach a control rig and re-target the animation to the Genesis 3 model.
101 stuff though if you want to retarget using MotionBuilder the first step is to add a control rig that you can plot the base animation to a set reference rig that MB understands.
Thanks for the pointers, after working through things again properly in MB I got this working with little trouble.
It’s using the original Genesis model, I started off with Genesis 3 but the older Genesis ended up being much easier to work with for a few reasons. If you know of anything it’s likely to throw up problems with further down the line then it’d be much appreciated!
The main reason for using Genesis was that Mixamo wouldn’t accept the Genesis 3 skeleton. What I’m working on will need interchangeable clothing meshes all rigged the same as Daz does for you, and trying to get them all set up with Mixamo’s generated autorig consistently enough was proving pretty much impossible. With everything else involved with getting a prototype up and running to see if there’s a worthwhile game in it, I won’t likely have the time to start learning enough about rigging to deal with this kind of thing properly any time soon, as much as it pains me to be relying so much on automated tools. Genesis also having all clothing work with both male and female models was a big bonus, while there are tools to transfer between them on Genesis 3 it was yet another process to learn then another step in the workflow that I can really do without because of the time involved.
Well not to try and sound like I’m selling Genesis 3 works well with converging technologies that can be harvested via the FBX pipeline using much more reasonable loads.
For lip sync G3 uses both morphs as well as facial clusters so you could hook up facial tracking or use Motion Builders voice device.
Mesh density for G3 is 16K poly and 32K tris
G3 products use power of two textures.
G3 uses half the material ID’s as do G1 and G2.
Over all though G3 is better designed to take advantage of converging technologies that have yet to be proven as a viable solution. With features like mocap and VR becoming affordable G3 is rigged to take advantage of those technologies.
Proof of Concept
This must be a bug in my eyes. I have filed a bug report here: https://answers.unrealengine.com/questions/418528/fbx-animation-import-of-genesis-3-figure-is-bugged-1.html . Anybody else who has expreienced this behavior should add to the bug report to show Epic that this is not an isolated phenomenon.
Hi, I don’t think this a bug, but more related to the design and rigging of Mixamo animations. You can use motion builder to retarget the mixamo animations to your DAZ rig, although it requires some extra setuo if you plan on using root motion. I use the DAZ genesis 3 rig myself and retargeted Kubold Movement Animset Pro as well as some Mixamo animations and it works fine.
Having similar issues with mixamo animations too except its when I export from Maya to UE4. My idle animation is spazing out the first few frames every time the loop resets, whereas it loops fine when I play it in Maya.