Please help me get root motion to work in a retargeted animation in UE 5.1.
Here’s what I’ve done:
In my source animation sequence, Asset Details > Root Motion > EnableRootMotion is checked.
In both my source and target IK rigs, pelvis is set as Retarget Root, and a retarget chain named “pelvis” is set on that bone.
In the IK retargeter, under Chain Mapping > FK > Translation Mode, I have alternatively tried setting pelvis as “None” and “Globally Scaled.”
In the exported retargeted animation sequence, again I have Asset Details > Root Motion > EnableRootMotion checked.
Despite all this, my retargeted animation continues to play without root motion. This is whether I drop it directly onto the level and simulate or I attach it to a BP character in a Cinematic Sequencer.
My goal in all this is to attach the retargeted animation to a BP character in a Cinematic Sequencer. The BP character doesn’t have an animation blueprint, but I’m not sure I need one if I’m attaching the animation to the BP character as a track. Pleae tell me if I’m wrong.
It turns out the source of my problem was I had a root bone in my source animation with no root motion, while the pelvis did have the root motion, just like in his video. This is because I’m using a Rokoko stock animation without a mesh, so I had dropped a static cube into it within Blender so I could export it to UE. The unmoving cube functioned as the root bone.
What I ended up doing was:
in the target skeleton in its Translation Retargeting options, I set the root to “Animation” and the pelvis to “Animation Relative.” All other bones are set to “Animation.”
In the retargeter’s Chain Mapping area, I set the root’s translation mode to “Globally Scaled” and the pelvis’s to “Absolute.”
I was then able to create the retargeted animation. I was interested to learn that if I reset the target skeleton’s Translation Retargeting modes back to the default “Skeleton” after all this that it broke the animation I previously exported from the retargeter. I thought animations were static assets once you create them, but apparently not.
Thanks for the detail on how it worked out. Animation and particularly re-targeting is one of those areas where Epic really could do with producing some educational vids or articles. I wish they would get the bods that create the software to explain it instead of using community manager type of people who I suspect don’t really understand much about it themselves.