After a number of animation imports for Daz’s Genesis 3 figure I am now convinced that there is a problem in Unreal which shows in particular with this model.
First I encountered and reported this problem here [link text][1] which I did not attribute to Genesis 3, but it seems that problem does not show with other characters.
If this problem here [link text][2] is caused by Genesis 3, I don’t know but it is worth investigating. By the way I am still waiting for a method by which I can send you a link for my uploaded models so you can test it for yourself.
Now I’m having this problem when importing animations: [link text][3] . This is just one of many. Basically all animations that utilize the legs of the Genesis character create an error in those legs. I can provide you with several example FBX files.
The FBX files ARE ok! I exported them from 3DS and then re-imported them back into 3DS to check. The re-imported animations are intact, so it is NOT the 3DS exporter. The problem occurs when UE imports these animations.
Whether this has to do with the separate nodes in the for thigh bending and thigh rotating or not, I don’t know, but this comes to mind since the character I used before, including your mannequin, don’t have this setup.
So, for now my only hope is that I can correct the faulty imports with the edit feature in persona which is of course terrible work since I have to correct every keyframe one by one. I would very much appreciate if this could be verified by you and recognized as a bug, even if the fix is sometime in the future, but I might be able to push out my manual correction then in the hope that you fix it before my release date.
I can send you several test files, but I need to know how I can send you the URLs in private since I have licensed these characters and can not post a download link in public
[1]:
[2]: UE crashes when importing too many LODs with morphs - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums
[3]: - YouTube
I did some searching in the Epic forum and there was a post in the forum with the exact same problem, also with the Genesis 3 character link text so it’s beyond a doubt now that this is a bug in Unreal with Genesis.
Like I said, if you need testfiles I will be more than happy to supply them
I sent a link to William’s forum account for a file named “Locomotion.rar”.
This file contains two animation FBX together with the original 3DS scenes.
One is a running character. You can clearly see that the legs kick outside while running in UE, yet the original animation in 3DS does not show this behavior. Try to reimport the FBX file into 3DS and you will see that the animation is fine. So the error must be in the UE importer.
The other one is just one frame from my jump loop. You can clearly see that the character has the legs wide apart in the orignal 3DS scene, yet in UE the legs are closed and crossed.
I think the problem is, that the UE importer gets confused by the skeletal setup in Genesis 3. This has a hip and pelvis bone close together and the thighs have a bend and a separate twist bone. Probably it can’t handle that correctly.
Another hunch is, that you are not able to move animations from your mannequin to the Genesis 3 . I tried all possible settings with the human rig, but the transferred animations always show horrible distortions in the thighs and the sholders (which also have separate twist bones).
Now, Genesis 3 is DAZ’s top model and it’s specifically targeted at the Indie game developer community with their new license model that allows using this model in games. I would imagine there are tons of people out there who want to use this model. I myself just spend 6 weeks replacing my old character model with Gemesis only to find out that UE can not import the animations correctly! You can imagine my shock and horror at this point.
So if possible I would ask you to look into this problem and at least accept this as a bug even if the fix takes a while, but right now, as it is, UE can not use the Genesis 3 character
Thank you
I did some more work on this (I have to in order to get these corrupt imports halfway working) and I am now convinced the error comes from the way the is setup in the arms and legs with a bone sequence like
Shoulder Bend → Sholder Twist → Forarm Bend → Forarm Twist ->Hand
What happens is, that the importer seems to propagate rotations that should go to the hand alone backwards to the forearm twist. when I correct these animations, I have to rotate the forearm (or leg for that matter) greatly in order to get rid of the mesh deformation and then reapply the rotation again to the hand.
I would appreciate if somebody from Epic would acknowledge this bug report. I have uploaded some test file and I can provide you with more as I go.
There is CLEARLY a bug in the Unreal FBX importer!
I would like to ask somebody from epic to acknowledge this bug please or at least that this is read and worked on. It’s been 4 days and I have heard nothing, yet most FBX imports with the Genesis 3 model are absolutely useless, going so far as to have wrong hip rotation where the character is imported 90 degrees rotated.
Something here is clearly wrong and I have lots of files for you to see for yourself, but I need to get in contact with somebody here
Hey Wallenstein,
I’m working on both this and your other post. I will likely get to this tomorrow, but in the meantime, I’d like to point you towards some people who have had success with DAZ3D models: How to import animation? - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums
I’d like to point out that it is often the case where an FBX file looks fine when re-imported into the software that created it, but completely breaks in other software. If I find that there is something truly wrong with the 4.11 import tools when it encounters these specific circumstances, then we will go from there. If your issue is in the Bug Reports section (and isn’t moved out because it is just in the wrong place), then it will be looked at. That much I can promise you.
-.
Hey ,
thanks for the answer. I found the videos on youtube before I made the bug report. but the characters used there are all either Michael/Victoria 4 or other generic simplistic characters.
Genesis 3 is the first model they have with a more sophisticated structure that makes animation much more visually appealing, due to the new mapping and the increased bone counts.
I was able to import M/V 4 characters and animatinos before, in fact, my game used these models so far, but two months ago I decided to invest the extra time and update to Genesis 3 because of the improved quality. I wish now I had started by testing animations first, but it never crossed my mind that the animation import may be bugged, so I spend all the time with the models and only recently stumbled over the animation problem.
I will upload a number of animation files tonight, all with crazy bone errors, so you have enough material to check.
The problem is that some imports are ok and others are not. It’s mostly for instance when the legs or the arms are far from the T pose. The more they differ from the reference pose, the more likely that there are distortions.
I have also observed that the second bone (for instance Thigh twist, coming after Thigh bend in the hierarchy) is greatly twisted and thus deforms the mesh unaturally. I am pretty sure the reason for all this is, that the hierarchy is too much for the UE imprter.
I also like to point out, that the aniation converter for different is simply not working with Genesis 3. I tried and tried to rig the UE mannequin to Genesis 3 in order to take over animations but arms and legs are horribly deformed. I even tried to make a new rig based on the Genesis and tried to map bones over since mannequin has fewer bones, but nothing works. Try and convert a simple animation over to Genesis and you will see what I mean
.
Hi ,
I’m uploading a for you now and will send the link to your forum account. The project contains a directory “animations” with a number of anims that all have distortions. Some in the limbs, some, like the ones where the character is on the bed, are rotated in the hip by 90 degrees.
There is a subdirectory with the original 3DS files so that you can see the original animations for yourself.
There is also a directory Mannequin2Genesis in which I used the humanoid rig to transfer an animation from the UE mannequin to Genesis 3. I tried my best to set up the rig for Genesis, but whatever I do, the animatinos always deform the mesh. Taking over animations through the rig to Genesis 3 seems impossible in my eyes.
I hope you find this project useful an will be able to identify a bug in the UE importer.
Thanks for your help and time
W
Hi, @Wallenstein .
Can you send me your project too?
I also working on adaptation anims and bodies of G2/G3 to UE.
Hey Wallenstein,
I figured I would check on the retargetting first and here are my observations:
So for the Mannequin2Genesis stuff, I decided to check the retarget manager and noticed a few things.
- You are using abdomenLower for spine_01 when you should probably be using abdomenUpper (and so on: spine_01=abdomenUpper, spine_02=chestLower, spine_03=chestUpper).
- The base pose for Genesis3 is a T pose, you need to adjust the Retarget Base Pose to match the Mannequin.
- You need to use advanced options in the tree to make sure the translation retargetting is set up correctly.
Mannequin Idle animation on Genesis3:
The instructions on how to do this can be found here: https://docs.unrealengine.com/latest/INT/Engine/Animation/RetargetingDifferentSkeletons/
I’m still investigating everything else.
-.
Your source animations from Max show up strange in Maya as well, so this is not a UE4 bug.
When looking at .max files, I noticed a few things that could be problematic.
- Bone and mesh scales in Max are all at 100, these should to be 1. I don’t know if the export from Daz3D is causing the scale issues, but that’s problem number 1.
- There is no bind pose. Again, I don’t know why, but I’d look towards Daz3D first.
I’m moving this out of Bug Reports. I’ll be leaving this unresolved so that can continue to help with your rig problems.
-.
Hi ,
I’m sorry, I just spend another 4 hours with the retarget setup without getting anywhere. Whatever I do, the mesh ends up deformed. I simply dont understand how you got this animation converted and I’m about to give up here.
Is there a possibility that you can send me the setup you did so that I can copy it into my project? Once I understand the setup I would make a wiki entry for others but I’m just not able to do it by myself
Ok, thanks for looking into it. Now is something I would never have been able to find out by myself since I don’t have Maya and would never have expected that 3DS could create errors when exporting files.
After your post I decided to try and import an animation file directly from the FBX that was created by DAZ Studio, and bam! It is free of errors!
I’m embarrassed that I did not think about trying this out earlier, but in my defense, I have been a loyal user of 3DS for more than 10 years now and would have NEVER expected that it would corrupt data like that.
So the whole import pipeline for Genesis 3 is a little bit more complicated since you HAVE to go through another application to get the mesh and morphs since DAZ Studio exports the mesh faulty (that’s well known) and you have to go through 3DS or similar to correct the mesh. But now we know that 3DS will also corrupt the animations and one has to take them directly from DAZ Studio. What a mess!
I will create a wiki entry soon to document all this for other users, since there will certainly be others who fall into the same trap. If you could contribute the setup for the rig so that we would also have a way to convert mannequin animations, that would be great.
You can download an example project here. I’ve only included the relevant content.
The main things to pay attention to are which bones I’ve chosen in the retarget manager for the spine joints, the retarget pose, and the advanced retargetting options.
- When you’re in the retarget manager, select “View Pose” at the bottom. This shows you the retarget bind pose for the character.
- You can actually grab bones, modify them, and then hit “Save Pose” to lock it in.
- You’ll want this to match the other character’s bind pose (Mannequin’s A-Pose) as closely as possible.
- After you retarget the animation, you’ll want to bring up the Advanced Options in the Tree.
- You’ll then Right Click and select "Recursively set to ", then change the Root and Hips back to “Animation”. This step takes some experimentation depending on the character, but you can take it from there.
-.
