Animation Retargeting...

Hello everyone! I am in the process of porting my project from unity to unreal (because Unreal is amazing :cool: ) and I am having a problem retargeting animations that work fine in mecanim but do not seem to be working in persona. I have set up the skeletons in the huminoid rig the exact same way in persona as I do in mecanim, making sure the bones match the correct ones.

Here is a shot of retargeting in unity…

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and retargeting in unreal…

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and here is the result of a retargeted animation

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These animations work and retarget just fine in unity…
I have not set up the hands or anything in the “advanced tab” but I have played around with the arm twists with nothing changing. I must be missing a step or a fix somewhere. Is anyone familiar with this situation that can help me out?

Have you tried to change the translation retargeting values? This video explains how to do it: https://youtu.be/5DR7pxGouWE?t=2m6s
Unity’s Mecanim doesn’t support translation on anything except the root and hips in humanoid animations so that could be the reason why the same animation looks different in the two engines.

What animations are you retargeting? if you already have the animation for your skeletal mesh you dont need to retarjet. Just import the animation and select your mesh skeleton

Originally I bought the rifle animset pro from the unity asset store and applied it to my character in Unity that I rigged in Maya using the AB_autorigger.

I was hoping that I could import the FBX file containing the animations and retarget them to my mesh in the same way, but I am running into this problem here.

Make sure that you didn’t re-target to any roll bones.

Skeleton containing animations is set as… Example

clavicle_r = RightShoulder
UpperArm_R = RightArm
LowerArm_r = RightForeArm
Hand_R = RightHand

while the retarget skeleton is set up as…

clavicle_r = Soldier_lf_clavicle_jnt
UpperArm_R = Soldier_lf_upArm_jnt
LowerArm_r = Soldier_lf_elbow_jnt
Hand_R = Soldier_lf_wrist_jnt

This is set up just like the “avatars” are set up with the huminoid rig in Unity’s mecanim system so I am wondering if there has to be additional setup or if this should just work.

If you look at the character’s forearm you will notice that it doesn’t appear to even be following the bone correctly. It seems almost like some kind of weight painting issue, yet again the retarget works fine in Unity so I don’t think this is the issue of any kind, plus the skin weights are fine in maya as well.

Hmm could this be an issue while retargeting in unreal?

I modeled and rigged my character in a basic T-pose

while the skeleton with the animations is in a slightly different pose

Looks like you’ve the hole skeleton at “Animation”? Did you try already to change recursive to “Skeleton” and afterwards put root to Animation and pelvis (or how it’s named in your skeleton) to anim scaled?

Edit: Yes poses should be (nearly) the same of course. You could save a pose for retargeting.

Yeah its still goofed up when I set everything to skeleton

The animation

and the retarget after setting everything to skeleton

At least the arm is not broken anymore :wink: - Did you fix already the poses? You could do this in UE4. Open skeleton, turn around bones and click on “save pose” in Retarget Manager if you are done.

Saving the pose of the skeleton with the animations to be more like a T-Pose fixes a lot of the issues. There are still some weird twists in the knees and elbows and some pops with the animation that drive me crazy but it will probably just need a lot of tweaking. Is there an option to force both skeletons into the same pose such as a T-pose or do I have move each bone and hope they are as close as possible?

I’m in doubt this could be done via an option. I know there are some animation sets that saved the retarget-pose in T-Pose and if you reset it then it’s A-Pose (e.g. current Kubolds Movement Animset Pro for UE4 in 4.8) … and if you buy an anim-set in the UE store that is compatible with 4.7 and 4.8 you should have both as well (because 4.7 was T-Pose and 4.8 is A-Pose). Seems like your anim set is from Kubold and that guy even made a (pretty cool) set for Unreal. So probably you could save a few hours if you get the UE version of Rifle Animset Pro as well. I know the 4.7 version of it uses the T-Pose. But if you made any changes to the animations already or if your mesh differs a lot from UE mannequin this would not be an option. You could even get some T-posed (4.8) mannequin from the free Demo pack on his website: Kubold - but this even would not help you with an non-UE-anim set.

Regarding your twists … I used more then once the wrong side of the bone in the retarget manager. I was pretty sure I chosed the right one but there was sooo many pull-downs (e.g. clav_l instead clav_r) and of course this causes twists.