IPI Motion Capture – Capture Motions – Clean them best as possible and export them as BVH
BVHacker – Remove T-Stance – Zero Hips to have character facing Forward – Align character best you can to the deck
Blender 2.70 – We have our Rig Setup – Import BVH and Remap animations to a our skeleton.
Take that same blender file and in pose mode finalize the animation – Line it up to the deck – Add the up and down / turn or rotation of the character etc
Export FBX & Import into UE4
Lets say we have a crouch animation, I guess I am stripping away root motion and alignment etc in BVH so we can get the character facing the correct way and not moving all around the area but staying in place. So if I play the animation instead of the character dropping down to the deck his feet just raise up off the ground that’s fine in BVH. So once the animation is transferred in Blender I re-add that motion back in, IE go frame by frame and keep his feet firmly planted on the deck, All looks great in blender.
Not sure if that is root motion or not exactly or what to call it. I import it in and right now and by default the editor doesn’t recognize it as an animation, it thinks its a Skeletal Mesh and if I select animation it says that asset doesn’t appear to be that type and might not import correctly. Either way it imports and seems fine but this could be the issue as well not sure, this wasn’t happening before either. However that root motion I gave the animation back is gone, so feet are coming back off the deck again.
I thought perhaps its a root motion issue so I created an animation montage checking root motion but that’s doesn’t seem to fix the problem - just seems to change the origin point of the animation start not the location on every frame.
This wasn’t happening before about 5 months ago when I did all our character movement animations with the same workflow in which I wrote everything down on our wiki so I wouldn’t have to remember how to do this. Now I am doing all action animations and this is being a pretty big problem because most action animations have a lot of root motion movement in them. When you strip this and the hips never move, or turn over or go up and down just looks awful.
And I am a novice animator so I am not trying to lay blame anywhere perhaps I am doing something wrong, I am looking for some understanding to the issue and guidance on how to resolve it.
Please don’t refer me to a blender forum - there is a bunch of different software interacting together and I know that both UE4 & Blender keep fussing around with the FBX importers / exporters.
Root motion translation in UE4 ignores Z movement unless the player is in for example a flying movement state. When in a movement state where gravity governs Z motion, the root motion translation ignores this.
It sounds like what’s happening is you DO have root motion, and Unreal is ignoring it. It might help to move your movement off of the root and onto another bone. e.g. Where you’re animating the armature object in Blender (to produce root motion), instead animate the highest bone IN the armature hierarchy (or bones if there are multiple direct children of the root, which is unlikely imo). Copy the locrot keys off of the armature object and paste them to the master bone, for instance.
Now Unreal won’t see the capsule attempting to move downward in the world, it will simply see the mesh attempting to move downward relative to the capsule. This should fix the issue, though it’s just a best guess without knowing more about your assets.
When I am aligning everything back to the deck in blender I am selecting all the bones at once with ctrl+a… So I guess I am changing all the bones information.
I guess I am a little confused about what your saying might fix it… I will have to play with this a little later if this doesn’t work I will try to find an animation/model/rig I can post up and share for the example.
Okay so no real replies and still no resolution that I can figure out myself. Again I am very tech oriented and doing rather well with animation but it could very easily be a simple mistake or something I do not grasp, so don’t assume anything here. This isn’t finished product either just something I put together for this thread.
I made a quick down and dirty Zip file of the exact issue I am outlining above, you can download the zip file below:
Pray_01 = is the Raw output file from our motion capture and ready for BVHacker
Pray_02 = is the tweaking of the file of zeroing out the root bone
Pray_03 = is just after import and retargeting of the BVH file in blender
Pray_04 = is the adding of root motion back into the skeleton & the FBX of that
This has the exact issue of the feet coming up rather than the body staying on the deck and going down. It also has the issue of it not recognizing the animation.
Thanks in advance and someone please show me the way!
Okay this thread has been sitting for a while without anyone finding the solution.
I will pay 20 bucks to whomever can solve this or teach this to me through a thread first.
Depending on location I can either mail 20 bucks or you can send me a paypal invoice preferable.
Can someone help me please - 20 bucks first come first served.
Sounds like you’re completely uninterested in using root-motion in unreal, is this correct? (I mean you want to move your characters position in the world with code, and just use animations to move the joints of the character).
If that’s the case then it sounds like the problem you’re having is in your blender / export workflow.
I tried looking at the FBX in your zip, but there’s no proper skeleton or animation in there, and I don’t have blender to check the other files.
But I assume that when you’re trying to correct the characters position in the animation in blender, what you want to do is just move down the hip-joint downwards and make sure that it’s getting new keyframes, don’t move all bones, or some weird parent-group/bones that might not exist in the unreal skeleton. If your joints have the correct keys in blender, I assume that the animations should match up when previewing them in unreal?
Edit: Just saw you had another much more updated thread about this (just found this one looking for actual unreal-usage of root motion), so feel free to ignore this
