Animation Retargeting and IK Bones

Development Character & Animation
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1

Hey there,

I have retargeted animations from the Mannequin to a custom skeleton and - kind of understandably - the IK bones in the target are not animated correctly after retargeting?

I am not quite familiar with IK in UE4, but I guess this would be an issue once I wanted to implement it with these retargets? How does one deal with this issue when retargeting?

Thanks and cheers!

2

Hi, you might want to take a look at the (relatively) new control rig editor in UE4.
https://forums.unrealengine.com/unreal-engine/events/1792009-inside-unreal-animating-with-the-control-rig-sample-project

It was created, amongst others, specifically for this purpose. When you want to retarget animations across skeletons that have deviating bone hierarchy information.
I am not sure what you need the IK bones for (I never understood why there were IK bones in the UE4 skeleton) but you can do all IK stuff dynamically using the control rig. I love it.

3

Thanks for answering!

Sound very promising, gotta take a look at it!

4

Also, can the Control Rig somehow be used in an additive or weighted way, meaning is it possible to combine it with existing animations like Additive Layer Tracks?

5

I took some time today to take a look at the control rig and I really like it so far.

I don’t know however… it seems to me that its main purpose is providing animation tools for sequencing, like cinematics or something. I found out that you can actually keyframe together an animation and save it as an Animation Sequence asset (so basically you can create animations inside UE4, which is nice and I will probably use it for this =D ).

However, I don’t quite understand (yet) how it should take care of the usual IK features like hand and foot IK for hand placement on weapons / tools / buttons etc. as well as foot placement for uneven ground.

Do you have an idea on that?

6

You can absolutely use it dynamically. There is a control rig node in the animation blueprint.
In the control rig editor, you have access to all the IK nodes: basic IK (two bone IK), Fabrik, CCDIK, etc.
Check it out the YouTube tutorial bei Inu Games on control rig.