MetaHuman Retargeting Issues in Unreal Engine 5.8

Development Character & Animation
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1

I’m currently facing an issue with MetaHuman animation retargeting in Unreal Engine 5.8.

When I retarget animation to a MetaHuman, the body animation is working, but the finger/hand movements and facial animation are not being transferred correctly.

The main issues are:

  • Finger animations are not retargeting properly.

  • Hand and finger poses become incorrect after retargeting.

  • Facial animation/data is not transferring correctly to the MetaHuman.

  • The same workflow appears to behave differently compared with previous Unreal Engine versions.

Has anyone successfully retargeted full-body + finger + facial animation to a MetaHuman in UE 5.8? If so, could you please share the correct workflow or any required IK Rig, IK Retargeter, MetaHuman, or Control Rig settings?

Any help or working setup would be greatly appreciated.

2

The 5.8 changes seem to make this worth looking into carefully. Hopefully someone can pinpoint whether it’s a configuration issue or an actual regression. The detailed examples in this thread should make troubleshooting much easier.

3

Hi @Prince_Santhosh welcome to the Unreal Engine community!

I believe that MetaHuman retargeting can sometimes be a bit of a challenge for hand chains as well as separate facial rigs

Before digging into solutions I wanted to ask a few clarifying questions to better understand your particular case

  1. Are you using the standard IK Rig/IK Retargeter workflow for the body or are you trying to drive the face and body through a single retargeter?

  2. For the fingers, could you check if the chain mappings in your IK Rig (specifically the finger chains) match between the source skeleton and the MetaHuman skeleton?
    Sometimes the rotation or bone chains need a minor tweak in the chain settings

  3. Also for the facial animation, are you using Live Link/MetaHuman Animator data or trying to retarget standard blendshape/bone animation from a custom source rig?

Once I know a bit more about how your source animation is set up, i’ll be able to find the most efficient workflow to get everything retargeted.

Looking forward to hearing from you!