I have used makehuman to create a character and exported the animation using the humanik rig/animation.
This is where I get confused, every tutorial I see that has blender animations, they are editing their model that has been exported with no rig… This gives me the option to use the inverse kinetics on the feet to keep them on the ground easily using the panel on the right. What confuses me is the unreal tutorials tell me to use the humanik rig settings, this doesn’t give me the inverse kinetic option in the right panel.
What is the difference between using the humanik rig settings or none? Because they both upload into unreal engine and they both show different skeleton structures that are more or less the same… Right now I am confused, I have been creating animations for a week now and I think I am going to have to start all over again because I simply do not understand what I am supposed to do here…
Please can someone explain to me what I am supposed to do and why?
If I choose no rig, what does that effect?
If I choose a rig, how do I get the editor in blender the same as importing the no rig? (With the coloured squiggly lines and inverse kinetics options. I’m really confused now as to what I should be doing.
Thanks for reading and I hope someone can explain this to me in a fashion I can understand.
In short: You don’t need the rigify rig for UE4. If you choose to export as *.dae without the rigify rig that comes with *.mhx export then you don’t have to care that much that you would loose the *.mhx export function in future versions of Makehuman. There is a *.mhx2 format for Makehuman 1.1 but it’s not official anymore and that means the export would be under the AGPL instead of the CC0 (which is bad for UE4). It just makes your live easier if you animate in Blender yourself because it contains IK bones and if you would use “MakeWalk” (for example if you would use some royalty free bvh mocaps) it should give you some advantage as well. If you would use it then you have to stay with MH 1.0.2. If you would create some mesh in MH and modifiy only the mesh in Blender and get some animations from UE4 store afterwards then you don’t need it. If you would create your mesh in MH modify and animate in Blender then I would recommend to just export as *.dae without rig. In both cases you should add a few bones yourself e.g. twist bones (for arms and legs: Re-tarjet problem and please advise - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums) and for animating in Blender a few IK bones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cGvalWG8HBU
If you would view all bones just unhide the hidden ones (or choose the layer that contains them in the armature panel). If you mean export then activating “Only Deform Bones” at fbx export settings in Blender should do in most cases. IK bones (or bones that does not look like bones anymore because they got replaced by some arrow or sphere meshes for cosmetic reasons but are still bones) usually don’t deform anything (don’t have any weights assigned to vertex groups) but modify other bones instead and are the visible ones because the bones that should follow the IK bones and actually got the weights assigned to some vertex groups are hidden as they often does not follow the user input anymore (but follow the IK bones instead).