I’ve been doing custom character rigs professionally since 2008. We want to move to import an fbx character and have the animations stay intact. Regardless of the settings, Unreal is extremely fickle about what it will accept.
Every rig I’ve ever built works in every game engine I’ve ever had to work in. Ogre, Source, Unity. Not a problem. My rigs can move across platforms, Maya, Max, Cinema4D, Modo, blender, and everything will stay intact. Rendering engines also not a problem.
And now comes Unreal. It wants something different. So what does Unreal want? The closest the rigs have gotten to moving correctly, the transforms of the bones begin to have an additive effect. This is very unusual.
From what I can tell, Unreal probably needs to supply its own rigging tools.
Unreal does have it’s own rigging tools (ART for maya and there are rigging tools for blender) and now in game / in engine rigs. If your rigs naming convention differs from Unreal’s default and you want to use it’s animations then you need to re-target it to the mannequin rig.
If i remember correctly unreal usually want s a root bone at world zero
Try going into the character’s skeleton and pressing the cog button and picking “show retargeting options” and try changing anything passed the root bone to skeleton or animation scaled or relative. Depending on the changes from the default rig it will have different effects
The doc describes it here
I just realized now that unreal was trying to do something based on the naming conventions of my character rig. So the moment I modified the names of the joints to something non typical Unreal loaded the character correctly with the animation intact.
Unity has something like this as well but it is up to the user to enable that functionality.
Good to see you were able to get it fixed. Happy deving