I am having a lot of problems exporting some animation from a horse rig and animation from maya to unreal. I’ve managed to get the base mesh in ok but as soon as I export any animation fbxs the neck of the horse completely inverts inside the body of the horse. My maya scene units are set to cms and I’ve set the z axis to up when using the games exporter on both the original mesh and the animation I am exporting.
I started investigating the rig more closely inside of Maya (its not one I made, just purchased) and when I delete all the controllers the neck flips out again. Looking more closely at it the base joint of the neck doesn’t have the same local bone orientation for the axises as all the other joints. All the other joints have the x axis pointing down the length of the bone, but this bone has the z axis pointing down the negative length of the bone. Is this the root of the problem?
(If it is the problem, is it possible to change the local bone orientation without having to completely reskin the horse? or could someone point me in the direction of the most foolproof way of doing this.)
i’m not an animator, but i had faced same problems in the past, when i bought or downloaded rigged models from the web. in my case, the problem was caused in the way the model was rigged.
in my opinion, you need to talk to your model provider and tell him/her that the model is not importing right into ue4, maybe he/she can make the model compatible with ue4 or give you a hint on how to import it into ue4.
Hi Enzoravo, so in the end it wasn’t possible to get the person who rigged it to fix it but I fixed it myself so I thought I’d post the full problem and solution here for future reference.
Problem: first neck joint local orient not consistent with other joints, transform with scale of 35 between the rib cage joint and the first neck joint, overall scale of 0.028 on the overall group in which the bones and the rig controllers were in (there was a group called horse which contained the joint hierachy and all the controllers). I also realised I couldn’t get rid of this overall scale without screwing up all the animation files that had references to the rig, so I had to find a workaround which kept this intact.
Solution: so at first I thought I could get rid of the transform by unparenting the neck joint from the transform, deleteing the transform and then using connectJoint to parent the neck to the rib cage but every time I did this, even using a completely new joint and trying to connect that to the rib cage, the joints would scale to something really tiny because of the overall scale on the group.
What I had to do in the end: Disable evaluate all nodes on the rig (including ik), detach skin, set the scale for the overall group to 1, remake the neck joints using the point snap tool to snap them to the original neck joints. I then deleted the orginal neck joints and the transform. I used connectJoint to connect my new neck joints to the rib cage with no transform. I then reapplied the scale of 0.028 to the overall group and reconstrained all the neck controllers to the various new neck bones, and then bound the skin back on.
