How to use animations from marketplace with Game Animation Sample?

[Ixiguis]

No matter what I do, I can’t get animations from UE4/UE5 to work properly with the Game Animation Sample. There is always some sort of problem such as characters floating, or looking too stiff, or tapered, or fingers looking totally weird. Anyone have a tutorial or step-by-step to properly retarget old animations to Game Animation Sample?

I’m using Metahumans for the characters (thus, using the Metahuman retarget from Game Animation Sample) and the source animations I tried from several packs already: “Generic NPC Anim Pack”, “50 Female Animations” (both the UE4 and UE5 anim versions), “AnimStarterPack”.

I’ve tried several methods – assign compatible skeleton and use the animation directly (UE4 and UEFN skeletons are the same after all), retargetting to both the UEFN mesh and the Metahuman mesh, using the provided retarget assets or letting it Auto Generate Retargeter, nothing works.

Example below for the result I get on a clapping animation (distorted fingers, tapered chest):

Thank you

[WrathOfAl]

Hey there,

I too have had some head scratching moments on dealing with re-targetting animations in various projects.

In my own GAS based project, I brought in a handful of animations and retargetted all of them to the base Skeleton Mesh (I think its something like UEFN - orange looking fella).

From there, I found that the animations worked fairly well across the board with all of the new Skeletal Meshes I brought into my project.

To be honest with you, I never had any great success using the Compatible Skeleton option. The result always looks “off” kind of like the screenshot you posted.

So my opinion here is, just retarget your animations to the UEFN skeleton, then let the GAS project handle the rest for you.

Hope this helps.

[Ixiguis]

Hey, thanks for your suggestion! However I tried that and still doesn’t work quite well. How exactly are you retargeting your animations? Like this? Auto Generate Regargeter is checked?

Didn’t work quite well for me, this is the original anim:

Retargeted:

Notice that the left hand (right from this perspective) is quite further away than the other hand in the original anim. The pinky fingers also don’t go over the other hand as in the original anim. So there’s a mismatch somewhere.

(I have removed Compatible Skeletons for this test)

[Ixiguis]

Ok, I figured it out. Turns out I had to create a new IK Retargeter asset, to retarget from UE4 skeleton to UEFN skeleton. That retargeter has to be carefully adjusted to best match the two skeletons.

I’ve uploaded my version, feel free to use.

RTG_UE4_to_UEFN.uasset (17.5 KB)

(This asset is created with the skeletons and assets are in the default folders from the GAS project)

Simply retarget animations and choose the provided retargeter instead of auto generate regarget.