I’m a 3d artist, I do mostly environments, and I have very little experience with animation. I did already some basic animations with bones on 3ds max and successfully imported them on UE4 (with a lot of work though, I find the animation system to be quite overwhelming).
Anyway, I have one of those Perception Neuron suits, and I’ve been playing a bit with it for mocap. I was able to record some stuff, and even import to 3ds max as a biped. But I can’t seem to import to UE4. If I export the animation as an FBX directly and then import in the engine I just get an error message (mesh contains root bone as root but animation doesn’t contain the root track). Well, I kind of doubt it would be that simple, right? So after some research I learned that I need to build a skeleton beforehand instead of trying to assign the animation to an existing one. My problem is that I’m not sure what is the normal workflow/pipeline for this kind of work. Should I just import everything into 3ds max and export again to UE4? What is motionbuilder for? Would you mocap experts like to share some info on this?
I haven’t done it myself yet but from what I’ve learned around the forums is that you can retarget the animation to the UE4 mannequin. It involves renaming the bones of the motion capture from PN and matching the name(s) of the UE4 bones. I’m afraid that’s all I know at this point.
Usually means that your exported FBX file contains the control rig from the host application and the animations are stored on a separate take. This is a common problem when exporting from MotionBuilder with the control rig turned on and exporting the animation clip and forgetting to uncheck “included control rig”
If you have access to both 3ds Max and MotionBuilder then don’t waste your time messing around with trying to retarget in Unreal 4 as you can do everything in Motionbuilder as a batch process.
The workflow would be.
Prep your base skeletal model in 3ds Max and export to UE4. In UE4 import the skeletal mesh with out animation and except for mesh updates that part is done.
In 3ds Max use “Send to” and send the rigged character over to MotionBuilder and characterize it to use a control rig. Merge the rig from the Perception Neuron suit and characterize it, you should not need a control rig, and set you characters input to Perception Neuron suit.
You are then set up to import you mocap BVH via your Perception Neuron character and plot it to your UE4 character model and then export it to Unreal 4 as a matched set of animations to the character model you exported from 3ds Max.
The other and better option is to use live streaming assuming that Perception Neuron has a mocap device driver for MB and assuming that it’s a serious piece of kit there should be one the flow would be to capture by actor input and plot directly down to your custom base rig that match’s the 3ds max/UE4 version.
Amazing detailed explanation FrankieV, thanks for that
I’ll give it a try using live streaming, they (Noitom) released a plugin for MB which I tried and works quite well.
Unfortunately the right arm cable is broken so I’ll have to wait for a replacement until I can test it again (at least with full body mocap).
Not sure if this is BEST practice, but this is how I have done this sort of thing:
Create, rig (with Biped) and SKIN the character.
Export character (only…not the Biped) as FBX, leave bake animations unchecked.
Import into UE4 as skeletal mesh.
Back in MAX, I loaded my mocaps (I used ipi software) onto the biped.
Select the character (not the biped) and export again…bake animation
Import into UE4, but uncheck import mesh and make sure to use the skeleton from the first import.
Rinse and repeat for each animation.
