I am creating a character that I want to use to put on the market place, I want this character to be as easily compatible with the existing UE4 animations as possible, preferably with Epic’s already existing UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton.
My preferred program is Blender, but I know that isn’t going to work, I can use the UE4Tools written by Lui [ADDON ] UE Tools - Community & Industry Discussion - Epic Developer Community Forums ( respect ), but it only allows me to import animations via a proxy and retargeting those, rather than import a mesh that allready uses the ue4 skeleton, so I’m thinking I should use Epic’s Anmation Rigging Toolset for maya, or maybe the biped character from 3dsmax. I’d really like my characters to use the existing UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton, which is in the third person template rather than using a new one.
Please give me some advice on this and let me know if Epic’s Anmation Rigging Toolset for Maya or 3DSMax’s Bipedal rig will allow me to set it to the UE4_Mannequin_Skeleton when I import.
Hey, probably not, but what you can do is import the ue 4 skeleton (just export as .fbx from the engine) into your blender or whatevs. Adjust your model so that the skeleton fits into it perfectly. Then skin it to the bones and export as .fbx back out.
When importing to ue4 make sure to import it to the existing ue4 mannequin skeleton. Thats it, you should be good.
If you want to make it for the marketplace then don’t touch the skeleton, rather only adjust the model and make it fit the skeleton so people don’t have to possibly retarget, etc.
If you assigned weight to IK bones remove it (remove all vertex groups that are called like your IK bones - you don’t need them). IK bones are used as targets and poles for your deform bones but should not carry weights themself.
Normalize the weights. There is an option in Blender to do that automatically, I guess there’s something similar in Maya. For example if there is only 0.3 weight at lowerarm and 0.2 at hand then 0.5 weight is missing for those vertices and assigned to the root. This causes ugly deforms like the one shown above.
Doublecheck weightpainting for some artifacts like it could happen if you paint in top view on top of your head but accidentally drop some paint below to the feet. You could verify that in weightpaint mode if you select one vertex group one after each other. If you find some unexpected weight fix it. Only a bit of wrong placed weight could already could causes ugly deforms like the one shown above.
If you only used a similar skeleton and did some retargetting take a look in the skeleton tree and change the translation retargetting from animation to skeleton for all bones except root, pelvis and IK bones. This even causes deform issues, but usually looks a bit more like broken bones, so I think it’s some spilled or non-normalized weightpainting.
