How can I remove the root and spine animation data from a Metahuman performance?

General Issues and Bug Reporting
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Hello,

I’ve captured an Animation Sequence from a metahuman performance. When I export I can either “enable head movement” or leave that option unchecked. My problem is that I want the rotation data from the neck_01 bone downwards (i.e. including neck_02, head, and all the facial controls), but there’s also rotation data on bones further up the hierarchy (root, spine01, spine02, etc) that I want to remove.

Assuming I export the asset with “enable head movement”, what can I do to remove the rotation data from certain bones?

I’ve already tried a couple of things:

  1. The first thing I tried was to open the Animation Sequence asset that I exported from the Performance asset, and simply delete the animation data from the relevant curves. However, I can see curves such as “CTRL_expressions_browDownL” but no curves for the bones such as root/pelvis/spine_01/etc". These bones are clearly moving in the preview window, so how do I edit the curves for them?

  2. The other thing I tried was creating a BlendMask for the asset. I created this and set all bones from neck_01, neck_02 etc to “1” and everything else to “0”. I couldn’t see any effect in the preview window, so I went to the AnimBP AnimGraph, found the “LayeredBlendPerBone” node, set BlendMode to “BlendMask”, and set the blend mask I previously created in the drop down. This doesn’t seem to have any effect. I’m wondering whether the Post-process AnimBP is overriding this mask somehow, but if I disable the post-process AnimBP, then I loose all animation from the spine and neck.

The only other thing I can think to try is to export the anim as FBX, edit it in Maya, and re-import, but it’s annoying that neither of the above are working.