Hello everyone,
I’ve been racking my brain since last night trying to solve a problem I’m encountering with Unreal.
I imported an animation from Mixamo where my character is walking, but NOT IN PLACE, because I actually want to keep the movement.
So, I imported my animation into my project, but now I realize that the animation stays in place. After searching a bit on the forums, it seems you can enable or disable root motion on the skeletal mesh, but in my case, it doesn’t change anything.
I should mention that this is for a cinematic, so there’s no need to control the character in my case.
I also tried with the mannequin from the starter pack, but it doesn’t work either.
So, if any of you have a solution, that would be really helpful.
Thanks in advance.
When importing animations from Mixamo, you can choose if you want them to be in place or not by ticking a checkbox on the side.
As for root motion, most models from mixamo don’t have a root bone. The bone with the highest hierarchy when you inspect it from your skeletal mesh asset is hips right? A ground anchored root bone is required to have in models in order to make root motion work with them. Because what root motion does is making the model’s capsule component move along with the animated model, while normally animations are just representational and don’t actually show where the physical character is. How can it know where the root should be if there’s no proper root bone, right?
You can solve this by adding a ground anchored root bone to your model either by using the Skeletal Mesh Editing Tools plugin or a 3D editor such as Blender or Maya.
Maybe there was a confusion on what root motion does previously, or if we got that cleared up, maybe there was a mistake in your implementaton on the functionality you wanned to add using root motion.
Here’s a great tutorial on a game mechanic that uses root motion using the default UE5 mannequin:
I suggest checking out the steps in this video. Hope this helps! 
Thanks for your reply, meanwhile I did a test with another skeletal mesh that doesn’t contain a root bone and it works. As you said the animation bones need to be related to the skeletal mesh’s root bone in some way but how can I do this?
I don’t think root motion can work without a root bone. Maybe your expected result is outputted but not the root motion outcome. Or maybe that model you mentioned does have a ground anchored bone which is not named root.
I don’t remember saying that 
What do you mean by this? By animation bones, do you mean the bones of your model? Are you referring to my suggestion on how you can add a root bone to your existing model? If so, you’d need to search for some tutorials on editing / adding bones. Like I said, you can do that using the plugin I’ve mentioned or a 3D modeling tool such as Blender or Maya. But it can’t be explained here efficiently since it’s more of a visual task.
Here’s one I found:
Once that’s done, you’d also need to retarget all your animations for the original model since they won’t work for the new skeleton.
Sorry, I didn’t express myself well 
, and I’m a bit lost with all this root bone and root motion stuff.
In the end, I don’t really care about having a root bone or using root motion—what I need for my cinematic is just for my character to reproduce the movement from the Mixamo animation.
And it works on skeletal meshes without a root bone apparently. The problem is that the skeletal mesh on which I want to apply this Mixamo animation has a root bone, so it plays the animation, but unfortunately, the movement doesn’t carry over: my character stays fixed in place.
Hence my question: is it possible to easily remove this root bone from my skeletal mesh, which is preventing the movement of my animation?
(For your information, I’ve only been using Unreal since this summer for cinematics, and I’m learning slowly. 
)
Oh I see now, thanks for the clarification 
Yes it is possible to adjust the skeleton. To see how, you can watch the video I’ve provided in my previous post.
The existence of the root bone isn’t the reason your animation plays in place. It’s because root motion is enabled for your animation. This is what root motion does, like I explained in my initial post.
In your original post, you’ve already stated that you tried disabling root motion. But I didn’t quite get what you meant by this:
Root motion isn’t something absolute, where your model either has it or not. You can turn the root motion on / off for a specific animation by opening up your animation asset, navigating to the asset details window, and there you should be able to see the “Enable Root Motion” option under the Root Motion section, which you can easily find by typing in “root” into the search bar. You can go ahead and uncheck it.
Hope this works out for you! 
Alright, thanks a lot for all your answers! I’ll check the video and see how I can fix my problem!