I’m currently working in Unreal Engine 5.5.4, and I’m trying to retarget some animations from Mixamo to my custom character using the new IK Retargeter. The animations look perfect in the preview window, but when I export them as assets, the resulting animation shows no movement at all — only the character’s head moves or nothing moves at all.
Here is what I’ve done:
What works:
I imported a Mixamo skeletal mesh and animations successfully.
I set up the IK Retargeter using correct chains and retarget poses.
The animation plays perfectly inside the Retargeter preview.
What doesn’t work:
When I click Export Selected Animation, the exported animation file appears to be broken:
The character doesn’t move in the exported animation.
It seems like the animation is missing most of its bone transforms.
Possible problem:
The Export Animation popup window only gives me 3 settings:
Asset Name
Export Folder
Retarget Pose
I don’t see the full export settings like:
Root Bone
Flatten Tracks
Enable Root Motion
This makes me think Unreal is using a simplified export dialog, which might be skipping important options that are required for the animation to work.
The issue here cannot be fixed the way you’re headed towards. The retargeting will result in a broken animation if the source SKM does not have a proper root bone while the target has, or vice versa. You’d wanna add a proper root bone to your Mixamo character that’s ground anchored, as the root is currently the hips. You can check out this tutorial to see how:
I followed a tutorial where they added a root bone to the Mixamo skeleton to fix export issues, and in the IK Retargeter everything looks fine – the animations play as expected.
However, after I export the retargeted animations and assign them to my Skeletal Mesh, the character appears lying face-down on the ground during playback. The animation is playing, but the character’s position and orientation seem completely off.
I tried rotating the root bone, and even the pelvis (hips) bone, but the exported animation still results in the character lying on the ground.
I’m wondering – is there something I’m missing during export or retarget setup?
Any help or suggestions would be greatly appreciated!
When such a thing happens, the animation is not just disoriented but is completely broken, due to the reason I explained in my initial post. However, if the only thing off in your retargeted animation is the orientation, inside the animation sequence, you can navigate to the Skeleton Tree window on the top left, select the root bone, rotate it accordingly in frame 0, and hit the Key button at the top with a plus (+) icon next to it. That’d fix the orientation.
Though if you’ve correctly added a root bone to the SKM that was missing it, regenerated the retarget assets, and retargeted again with the auto retargeter, it should’ve been fine. Weird
Thank you so much – the issue is perfectly resolved!
After I rotated the root bone of the source skeletal mesh and inserted a keyframe, the export direction was finally corrected.
It turns out I had missed the step of properly keyframing the root, so my adjustments weren’t being recorded.
Really appreciate your help – I learned a lot from this!
What works:
What doesn’t work:
Possible problem:
Reference images:
My question:
