I am using character models, skeletons and animations from various authors. They all use the default ue4 skeleton but when I combine these together by retargeting the skeletal meshes and animations onto my main skeleton I run into issues where the animations are no longer correct on the new meshes.
Some meshes will look fine, some will look like the posture is a bit warped and others will look really bad like the screenshot below. It seems to depend on the author of the mesh and the author of the animation.
Here is an idle animation example:
I believe there are slight differences in how each author aligns things and sets them up which is causing these problems. My best guess is that because the animations are all additive, it must mean the skeletal meshes aren’t all in the same starting position.
What I’m not sure about is how to fix this.
- When I assign the meshes to a new skeleton they look fine in A-pose but the second I put on the animation blueprint things get deformed slightly.
- I have tried retargeting animations from one Skeleton to another but it had no effect and the result was identical. This makes me think the skeletons don’t match perfectly. Perhaps some bones are rotated slightly, different lengths or something. I’m not really sure.
- I tried saving an a-pose from my main skeleton and loading it into another skeletal mesh to realign before reassigning the skeleton or retargeting animations it but couldn’t figure out how to do this. I’m not even sure if this is a feature yet as it seemed not to work and did nothing when loading the pose.
What is the workflow for fixing this? Should I re-rig the models or retarget the animations? Is there a way ue5 can fix this with a tool or settings? Am I perhaps doing something wrong or did I miss something obvious?