Beginner questions about root motion

I’ve been using UE4 for about a year now and decided it was finally time to learn the possbilities of root motion and anim montages.

I’ve got lots of Mixamo animations with root motion, but I’m having trouble getting started.

  1. I’m wondering why my running animations rotate the character slightly to the side when I use ref pose as lock. Using 1st frame as lock instead fixes this issue, but I don’t really understand why it doesn’t work with ref pose.
  2. In PIE my slots rarely seem to get started (or their montage). I called play on the montage both in the anim-event-graph (init animation) and on the character (beginplay), but I have to change the character’s animBP a couple of times, before it finally goes from ref-pose to animated.
  3. When finally being animated in PIE, the character doesn’t get any root motion. It just keeps running in place, even though in the animBP-preview window, root motion is visible when I enable it.
  4. The root-motion there looks kind of “jumpy”, not very smooth at times. Is it possible that root motion is very sensitive to fps drops and irregularities?

It’s a very simple setup: just an animBP (RM from montages only) with one montage, which only has a single animation, which has root motion enabled.

What I’d also like to know: is it possible/recommended to use root motion exclusively in a multiplayer setting? Since only montages can replicate root motion, I could imagine this poses a big problem when dealing with locomotion-state-machines etc.
And is it likely that a sort of universal root motion replication will come in a future version (soon-ish)? Because then I could use “root motion from everything” and postpone multiplayer until later.

Isn’t there a really good and thorough tutorial about root motion somewhere?

Hi MaxPower,

Our documentation on root motion is fairly thorough: Root Motion

-and for getting an interactive look at this in practice, I recommend downloading the Content Examples and checking out the root motion example in the Animation Map. Here’s the documentation that accompanies the project:

Animation Content Examples.

-.

I had a lot of those issues, but going through the tutorial sorted them out for me. Plus some good old google searching.