Good morning all,
I am having a funky problem here and I hope I am posting in the correct channel.
THE GOAL
as you can see from the static image, i have my green character that i made and i am trying to get Epics Animation to work with it.
HOW I GOT HERE
The green character is the same exact height as Manny and is using the UE4 skeleton ( the character set in the middle is the 2 of them overlapping so you can witness accuracy).
Before I skinned my character, I made sure to x-form it
When I exported my character out, its also in the same unit scale as Manny
When I imported the character, I chose Manny’s skeleton named ‘UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton.’ I am definately using Epic’s Character.
I did not scale my character down or up to match the size of Manny. It imported IN this way (its scale is perfect).
As soon as I drop in this animation: “ThirdPersonWalk” which is in the starter content, my guy balloons.
When I imported it and chose the Manny Skeleton, I didn’t get any errors (which I am so elated for)!
The bones in my character are the exact skeleton that is being used with unreal. I think the issue may be that my dude is coming in from Max and not from Maya. So the distance between bones is accurate.
A friend suggested that I import the character in as its own character without attaching it to Manny’s skeleton to check and see if the character is a different scale;
It is still perfect.
While I was here, I screen grabbed the hierarchy to see if that was an issue too.
One thing that is new here, I can not use an existing animation asset on this skeleton as it is… without retargeting.
I am learning about retargeting. The problem that I am facing is…
I am looking to create accurate compatibility with Epics existing animations vs. having to copy existing anims and porting them into my character.
As you can see, we know that this method works. But it isn’t actually solving the actual problem. This is a workaround and I am not excited about it. By retargeting, then ‘exporting the selected animations’ swells the size of the package by duplicating animations that already exist in the starter content. It’s actually counter productive to what I am doing.
I am going to do another test… I am currently working in Centimeters in 3DS Max.
I am going to convert this out to meters and see if it actually works that way.
I have same problem, exported mesh to blender, edited it and now after
importing back to editor and reassigning skeleton it’s huge when playing animations. You can right click on animation bp and retarget whole thing easily with included animations but it still sucks to have them doubled.
Retargeting is definately an option and I was able to get retargeting to work.
It turns out what the problem was is that the dummy objects that I used to create the bones in Max were too small. I created them in Meters but unreal wants me to export my content in Centimeters. When I take my Max scene in Meters and change it to Centimeters and then export, the character geometry changes size but the bones are the correct scale. its a VERY bizarre issue.
Yesterday, I exported the skeleton out of unreal, deleted Manny and constrained that skeleton to my rig. Everything worked PERFECTLY after that with no issues. I basically did all that hard work creating my own bone structure in Max as a huge waste of time.
