Animation retargeting with exact same skeleton (mixamo) doesn't work

Development Character & Animation
1

Hello.

I’m trying to do animation retargeting for a custom character. Below I tell you the entire process I’m following:

I uploaded it to mixamo, rigged it, applied animations everything looked great, so I downloaded it (t-pose).

Now on UE4 I already have a character blueprint and a class bp for a mixamo character & mixamo skeleton working perfectly, animated & all.

This is why I created this new character to be 100% identical to the mixamo character such that skeleton & animation retargeting will work.

So I import this new custom rigged mixamo character to UE4 with its skeleton (no warnings come up).
Now to do skeleton retargeting:

  1. I set humanoid rig to both skeletons (manually mapped the bones already).
  2. I set the imported character’s t-pose from a pose asset I created (the one downloaded from Mixamo)
  3. Then I go to my already created mixamo character anim blueprint -> Retarget Anim Blueprint -> Duplicate Anim Assets and Retarget and choose my newly imported character skeleton. It shows up on there, all good.
  4. I change the destination directory and hit Retarget. Everything gets copied fine, it’s all good.

Now I open an animation file or a blend space of the copied animations and what I see is my Skeletal Mesh pose (not even the t-pose) and the character’s head is down on the floor “dancing”, acting very strange anyway.

As I said both skeletons are identical and both characters were taken from Mixamo, so why this animation retarget wouldn’t work?

I must be missing something. Help will be greatly appreciated.

Unreal Engine v4.23.
Thanks.

Edit:
I want to emphasize that im not trying to retarget to the ue4 mannequin, but to a Mixamo skeleton for a mixamo character built from scratch and already have working perfectly. this skeleton (should) be identical to the one I just imported(it also has a few sockets on, I don’t think that hurts).

2

Ok I “fixed” it. It does work if I retarget the individual animations, blend spaces, aim offsets what have you.

Apparently I was a bit hasty and I went ahead to retarget the entire animation blueprint from the beginning.

You may be thinking why would I want to retarget skeletons/animations either way, since its the same skeleton, just a different skeletal mesh, shouldn’t it work by simply swapping the skeletal mesh asset? Well I thought that too. In fact, that’s what I did the first time. But the animations don’t work, they animate very wrong. If somebody knows anything kindly leave a comment. Because if I can’t figure this out it means that I will have to create a copy of all animations/blend spaces/aim offsets/anim blueprint for every single character that I import (where only the skeletal mesh characterizes a “character” here). This is of course unacceptable because It doesn’t scale.