Metahuman animator heads floating like neck broke

Hello!
I’m facing a strange issue. Before I never seen this one, my wokflow worked perfectly before.

Im using the same process like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hZ2mkcd4C7M&t=465s

When I try to apply the animation to the metahuman head, weird issues happening. Always different. In the video I will attach its like the character broke its neck. Other times the jaw got sucked into his skalp etc… What could be the problem? The metahuman is as fresh as you can download from quixel bridge. https://youtu.be/4NoobsHrhnI

This is a simple export from metahuman performance, I tried using the level sequence as well, but similar results!

thank you!

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The link is broken. Can you share the solution?

Been seeing this (or at least it sounds very similar; the op video link is broken now). Detachment from the neck/chest area in metahuman animator captured face anims, and neck alignment problems; in my case it ended up looking like the character had a severely, comically broken neck. This is specifically for face captures that contain head movement information, facial only stuff works with no modification.

Spent ages looking into it, and basically the problem lies in the procedural head control rig inside the post process anim blueprint of the face.

Inside this control rig, there is logic that is procedurally creating movement on the root bone. I disconnected both of these nodes because I don’t want any root bone transforms at all in order to match the body. This fixes the detachment at the chest/neck area. Then you need to take a look at the next node, which is full Body IK. One of the controllers that is driving this IK is for the head, which is set up right at the beginning of the control rig logic by placing the IK controller at the transform of the head bone.

This is one of the first nodes in the graph. Add an offset in Z to the head bone transform that the vanilla control rig uses. There is a handy option on the node to do this directly. In the vanilla graph, spawning it at the base transform of the bone is causing it to wig out and break the characters neck, I think because it is attempting to point at something that has the exact same transform and it’s getting confused. Lifting up the controller a little bit allows the targeting to work properly and straightens the neck out. I suspect that this adjusted positioning probably needs a bit more thought to be perfect in all cases, but the genesis of a proper solution is there and this is most definitely where the issue is with essentially all ongoing problems of connecting meta human face and body animation.

In addition to all this by the way, you’ll need the usual Layered Blend Per Bone node in the main face animation blueprint, to merge the body and head/face movements. I used a branch filter set to the bone “neck_01”.