How to export characters that shares a skeleton from Mixamo

Development Character & Animation
, , ,
1

Hello,
I created several characters mesh that are only slightly different. As I dont want to rig the mesh myself I am using mixamo to rig them and download some animations.

When I imported my first rigged character on Unreal, I kept his skeleton as the “generic” one so I could use it and all its animations on my other characters. The thing is, when I export a new character, that is rigger also with mixamo, and I choose the “generic” skeleton, it give me and error that it as “failed to merge some bones”.

If I ignore the message and I preview the animations it works fine, but I still get the error message " This skeletal mesh asset has an incompatible Skeleton. Assign a compatible skeleton to this skeletal mesh asset. ". each time I save the skeletal mesh.

To my understanding, this is because the name of the root bone is not the same. Unreal seems to take the name of my mesh to create a root bone from it. And as all my meshes have different names, the root bone ends up having a different name.

So if this is the hierarchy i have on my generic skeleton in Unreal Engine, how should I name or export my blender rigged character to unreal ?

1
1535×904 19.2 KB

I tried “Armature_003” but it wont work, and idk what this is but there is a little dot left of the name of the root. When I export other characters I dont have this dot so I am not sure what it means.

I am really lost on this. It seems like the solution is very easy as its only a naming issue but I cant find any way to export my characters on this skeleton.

Thank you !

2

I think you forgot one crucial step.
In order to import a Mixamo animation to a character inside Unreal, you need to use a skeleton that has the Mixamo bone structure.
What you should do is take any character (the default Unreal mannequins are fine), and export the static mesh as .FBX file. Use the default settings..
In Mixamo, upload this file, Mixamo will create a skeleton that matches the Mixamo’s - which may take some time. It will be have the default pose as animation. Next, download this ‘animation’ but be sure to set “WITH SKIN”. Give it another name and/or location in Unreal, and when done, import this character - be sure to check “import skeleton mesh”.

You must use this skeleton mesh when you import Mixamo animations into Unreal.
After import, retarget the animation to any character (or metahuman) you have in your environment.

HTH