Hello, I tried watching a lot of tutorials on this but I still can’t get the IK retargeting to work.
What I’ve tried so far:
• Used TTToolbox to create a rig for XBot that matches Manny, and it entirely does except for the lack of twist bones.
[Edit]: Tutorial on how to get the Mixamo skeleton set up using this plugin. Mixamo Retargeting Experiment - UE5 - TTToolbox
• Root, Spine, Head, all legs and IK retargeting chains have absolute translation mode.
• Every single chain mapped I set Blend to Source as 1.0.
Hi there,
If you are Blender user, there is a free addon that adds root bone to a character, then adds to animations. The good part is that it also works with file folders, so you can convert multiple animations in batches.
Thank you L.F.A. for responding, before you did however, I found Mixamo to UE5: the ULTIMATE Guide already and I fixed that issue. That was my bad, I didn’t have time to update that info before now. Thank you for the other guides.
I’m still however trying to figure out why my animations aren’t being remapped correctly.
No, problem, good to know you’ve fixed the issue. It’s hard to tell what is wrong because I am not using UE5 Retargeting for custom characters. If I had to do it, I’d retarget to UE4 Mannequin in UE4.27 and bring to UE5 to retarget to Manny and Metahumans.
Honestly I might just try that. I’m using the Top Down Template in UE5 and fortunately there’s also UE4 Mannequin in that, I’ll get back to you on how the process goes. This is not the only time I had retargeting issues either in 5.
Tested in Top Down Template retargeting Mixamo XBot to UE4 Mannquein:
. Didn’t go so well so I’m downloading 4.27 and trying to retarget from there.
L.F.A, I’m curious, since the Top Down Template has its own UE4 Mannequin, how would I bring the UE4 Mannequin from 4.27 to 5? Would I just make a duplicate and give it a new name, or would I retarget 4.27’s UE4 Mannequin to 5’s then retarget 5’s to the UE5 Mannequin?
If you’re using the UE5 Top Down Template, I believe it does have the old UE4 Mannequin. If that is not the case, these are the steps:
Retarget your animations in UE4.27 to UE4 Mannequin.
Export the mannequin and animations to disk.
Inside your UE5 project, import the mesh first. Next, import all animations to UE4 Mannequin.
Finally, retarget from UE4 to Manny using the new IK Retargeting. You need the IK Rig “UE4_Mannquin-UE5Manny”, and I am quite sure the UE5 Top-Down template comes with all files you need.
Alright, I redownloaded UE 4.27, and had my Mixamo animations onto my UE4 Mannequin, then transported those animations to UE5, gave them UE4 Mannequin’s skeleton, and all works fine on that end. I then look into the retargeting of UE4 and UE5’s IK Rigs and the result seems to be that UE5’s character’s upper body is stuck in place while the appendages are moving along. I set all of UE4 Mannequin’s new animations to Enable Root Motion. I have not touched either of their IK rigs, just used UE5’s Mannequin as a reference on how to set up my previous X Bot.
Great, good progress, I can see the front facing animations are less distorted than before. It seems the issue now is the root bone rotation is not being transferred over. I am not expert at retargeting, but I would recommend you select root and pelvis and test different rotation options separately.
I’ll tweak around with that and get back to you. Someone also suggested my original problem might have came from X Bot and 5’s Manny having different poses. I’ll try what you suggested and the other person suggested too.
The difference in binding poses would mostly affect arms alignment. If you need a Tpose, here is my reply to a different post on this topic. You may want to repeat that workflow with the UE4 Mannequin, before retargeting from Mixamo in your UE4 project:
Thank you, how would you have the UE4 Mannequin or Mixamo X Bot have the A Pose instead of the other way around. So I tried to go back into XBot and made a new T Pose right inside the IK Retargeter editor, afterwards I tested the crouch cover transitions, and they work.
If the issue is with the binding pose like you said, I’ll try and see if I can make a new binding pose for all three of my skeletons.
On X Bot I made 2 pose assets in the X Bot skeleton in UE5, problem is that the two poses don’t save and now are the same pose, even if I change one it’ll change the other.
In the UE4 to UE5 Mannequin retargeter, I tried playing around with the FK portion in the root and spine, it doesn’t do anything except mess up more of the target skeleton in some of the animations. I changed the source root in UE4’s mannequin to be Root just to see what would happen, doesn’t seem to be a difference either.
Did a bit more tests, went into my SK_Mannequin which is a skeleton and gave them the UE4 Mannequin’s skeleton and X Bot’s skeleton compatibility, the animations from UE4’s Mannequin kind of works while X Bot’s completely doesn’t at all.
Will try translation retargeting in UE5 and see how that goes, if it has something to do with the rotation then maybe I can use AnimationScaled for the animation data in UE5’s mannequin’s upper body.
Just adding on to this, I also asked on Reddit at How to create matching binding poses to fix IK retargeting issue in UE5, so it turns out this is a bug. This person solved it that way but I think your solution might also work once the engine matures and doesn’t bug out, but I think this is the solution and I will put it as such for now. Hopefully the ability to edit this comment doesn’t time out or something.
Hey guys another possible solution is to uncheck “Allow Frame Stripping” on the affected animation. This fixed some of the weird distortion issues for me.
