I have a problem with importing certain animations from one of our artists into Unreal Engine 4.1.1. She made very detailed Idle animations for all our characters. The characters already have skeletons and properly working animations in UE. When you view the idle animations in Maya, they’re very detailed. That means they mostly consist of small movements. The head rotates a little bit, arms and legs move up and down, the hands open and close a bit. Although those movements are small, they’re still big enough to easily notice them in Maya. However, when I import these animations into UE4, almost all of the motion is gone. Whether it be arms, legs, head or body, nothing moves at all in UE4. The only things that still do anything at all are the hands, which still open and close. But even their movements are unbelievably small, you have to zoom in really close to even notice the hands are moving at all. Now I’m really desperate. I already tried exporting the animation with a higher framerate from Maya. Normally it has 48 frames @ 24 FPS, I exported it with 1200 frames @ 600 FPS. It made no difference, though. I also tried various other settings in UE4, like disabling compression override. Nothing I tried had any visible effect, though. Anyone here has an idea what else I could try? I’d be helpful for any hints!
It’s probably a compression setting. I haven’t messed with animations in UE4, but in UDK you there are several animation compression options, and you also have to recompress the animation after changing those settings for them to take effect.
You might want to double check to make sure that the animations match the rig. At the moment the rig animation connection is rather fragile.
Import the rig with the animations into UE4 and create a new skeletal rig for the model. If the model now moves the way it should then your rig for your base model does not match the rig used to make the animations.
My girlfriend solved the problem. As it turned out I had to export the animations form Maya with “Constraints” option unchecked. For some reason exporting the constraints from Maya to the FBX file made Unreal Engine ignore a lot of bones from the animation (so that only the hands were moving). Unchecked Constraints and now the animation behaves as it should!
