So I’m trying to fix a bug I found but for now I can’t really figure out why its happening in the first place.
I have a metahuman character with custom animations. I exported the metahuman to blender to modify its mesh and import that as gloves armor model.
To test I firstly simply removed the unnecessary mesh from the model, reparented the whole thing to the armature and imported back the model with mannequin skeleton.
The process was this:
-Export as fbx
-remove everything but the lower arm and hand area
-reparent
-export the mesh and armature without leaf bones
-in UE5 import as fbx with mannequin skeleton.
I then added a skeletal mesh component to the character and set its anim bp to the one I use on the character (ABP_Quinn). The basic animations work flawlessly as expected but montages simply do not play on the new skeletal mesh which is already interesting (tried copy pose from mesh in the anim graph, same result as below with set leader pose component).
Then I removed the animbp and inside the character construction script set the leader component of the gloves skeletal mesh component to the main Mesh (character mesh).
Once I load in the gloves mesh is distorted and stretched all around.
As with the animbp it works flawlessly and as it has all the vertex group info from the model I really don’t think its bad weight painting.
Does anyone have any idea what could cause this issue or where should I look?
Its been days looking for a fix, tinkering around and I know it must be a bad setting on my part but for now I can’t figure it out on my own.
Any help is appreciated!
I’m super lost as to what is happening. You say it’s working perfect, but then say montages don’t work. So the problem is only when you play montages?
I’m surprised this works with any basic animations period. When importing from Unreal into Blender it will do it wrong from Unreal, then export wrong from Blender to work right in Unreal. This is due to Unreal having a very strange bone orientation it has to use because reasons. If you want it to export right from Blender look up Game Rig Tools plugin for Blender.
Oh sorry, I forgot to mention I set every orientation manually and the hierarchy as well in Blender so it looks good.
Since then I have tried exporting the metahuman and reimporting it right away with sk_mannequin and then test it the same way and set leader pose component and copy pose from mesh are both distorting the model. I do believe it narrowed me down to import settings, have to test them further.
Thanks for the plugin, I will also try this!
“Works perfectly” means no distortion while the animations run but montages don’t play at all on the imported mesh while it plays on the base character mesh.
Okay so anyone suffering from the same problem the solution for the above is this:
editor quality preset.
-It forces low LODs to improve performance,
-metahumans cut the number of bones on lower LoDs,
-mesh with fixed LoD tries to look for the bones to copy the pose or set their own transform,
-can’t find them in between the ends so for a shirt the wrist and neck area look perfect, anything in between gets distorted or does not animate at all
-increasing LoD increases number of bones in metahuman model, with ‘high’ editor quality preset reaching the proper number.
Fix is easy, custom LoDs for every armor (obviously, would have done it anyway) and/or weight paint the bones that are permanent on every LoD and kinda skip the ones that get removed on lower quality levels.
Interesting find, #FeelsGoodMan.