I’m following several YouTube tutorials to try out motion matching with custom animations.
The setup process is surprisingly easy and straightforward, however, I don’t get the same smooth result compared to the tutorial video - which uses copied animations from Epic’s motion matching project.
Just out of curiosity, does the current state of motion matching rely on a specific set of animations to work properly?
There are certain features with some requirements for the mesh, like root motion. You would need to have a ground anchored root bone in your model’s skeletal mesh in order for that to work. (Warping is also used in motion matching which needs root motion to be enabled so that’d mean it’s also a requirement in this case) But motion matching as it is doesn’t really have a standard animation type like you suspect, at least nothing particular comes to my mind currently.
Now, about your issue! The animations in Unreal’s sample project which you’re probably using have hundreds of variations to fit in any given situation, so the lack of animations could be why you get that feeling. Also, if you’re using a custom model and retargeted the sample animations to it, maybe there could be imperfections there as well. You can test that by playing standard animations with no extra thing going on in the background and compare the models side by side. If you notice something’s off, you can try manually setting up the retargeter which you probably auto-generated.
Hello, thank you for the explanation.
I’m using animations with root motion and my characters have root bone - however, the bone hierarchy is different from Epic skeleton, that may be a potential cause of the issue.
I’ll keep trying, it’s good to know the current state of motion matching does not rely on a special set of animations to work.
every example that I have seen that works is always a “standard” unreal skeleton.
I have tried using custom skeletons and they always have some strange behaviors, but the best results I have seen thus far require the root bone to be oriented the same as the standard skeleton.
that is to say that in unreal editor the root bone’s forward is positive y, up is positive z, and left is positive x.
all bones above that seem not to matter.
I’ve read all the documentation I could find and nothing suggests that this would be required but experimenting leads me to believe it is at least a factor. to be fair I may have just missed something.
It looks like we are going down the same path, I’ve also noticed the root bone orientation problem shortly after I made this topic and fixed it in my custom skeleton before import.
However, even after I made my root bone orientation identical to the default epic skeleton and adopted epic’s “standard” locomotion animations, the pose search result still acted weird - not as smooth and responsive compared to epic’s animation sample project.
I suppose I must have overlooked something in my motion-matching setup.
I’m using DazG8 skeleton in case anyone have experienced with Daz to Unreal process and wanted to help me out