Mixamo turn in place animations not working with Motion Matching (video example included)

Development Character & Animation
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Hey guys I was just wondering if any of you lovely people tried to use the new motion matching system with Mixamo animation and/or maybe could point me in the right direction in solving my issue.

So I’ve followed the tutorial below on how to setup motion matching but I used Mixamo 8-way rifle animation pack instead and everything worked fine until I got to turn in place part and I’m lost.

I’ve done it the exact same way with Lyra animations and it worked perfect, oddly enough I didn’t even have to add a new channel or sampled bone in the Pose Search Schema like it was done in the tutorial but when I try to replicate it with Mixamo animations it falls apart at turning in place part.

The only difference I had to make to Mixamo animations comparing to Lyra ones is I had to enable looping on them, Lyra animations work without looping and the only Mixamo animations that must have looping off are the turn in place animations.

Also Mixamo has only 90 degrees turns left and right and Lyra has 90 and 180 degrees turns left and right. I’ve uploaded UE6 Manny to Mixamo to make sure the animations are compatible with the skeleton without having to retarget them and I did use mixamo converter to convert mixamo animations to UE read animations as well.

So finally what happens when I setup motion matching turn in place with Lyra is when I start the game the character turns left once immediately then straightens back out as he should be and if I turn in place the animations don’t work at all and if I move around a little bit then as soon as I stop the character he does the same left turn and straightens back out same as he did at the very start.

I can’t figure out at all what’s wrong and was hoping some one could help so thank you all very much in advance for any support.

Here’s the link to the tutorials that I followed and I can provide more details along with project files if needed:

Unreal Engine 5.4 Motion Matching Tutorial in 5 Minutes (youtube.com)

And here’s the recording of how I’ve set it up and what result I’m getting:

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Hello,

Be aware that most animations in Mixamo have root bone issues in Unreal.

I’m not saying this is the reason your attempt is failing, I’m suggesting that you use Marketplace or Default animations instead, and see if it works. If it does, then it’s Mixamo that is the issue.

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Interesting trash… er… stuff they have come up with.

Seems by your example that there is a stop moving animation which is taking the twist or turn instead of a stop moving animation.

To really see what is being used you likely want to slomo .5, record the screen with ~show animdebug (tab to the character after) on, and read what animations are in use for the given pose.

If you do the leg work (pun totally indeded, not.) You can probably use any DCC to remap the skeleton from one to the other and force the extra root bone to be present across all animations.

Idk why you would, since it looks like the animation of an edjit tip-toing around with a rifle more than anything else, but to each his own I guess…

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Hi thank you so much for the reply, I’m aware of mixamo animations having root bones issues hence I used the mixamo converter and most animations work no problem except the turn animations. Mixamo animations are definitely the issue I’m just wondering if it’s fixable and if it’s worth fixing.

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Hey thank you so much for the reply, I’m not sure if I fully get you but if I do then I didn’t include any stop or start moving animations in the Pose Search Database yet, there’s only 8-way walk, run and sprint animations and 2 turn animations, left and right 90 degrees. I’m defo not sure what you mean by doing the leg work but would I not get the same result remapping animations using the UE5 retargeting? Also yeah I’m aware the animations are janky but it’s more for educational purposes rather than final project so that I can use any animations with Motion Matching rather than be restricted to marketplace or Lyra animations only… At least until 500 free animations will be released :slight_smile:

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Not worth fixing, which @MostHost_LA alluded to.

I can’t believe I used the word “alluded”.

MostHost is a lot of things, but allusive isn’t one of them.

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Given the quality of animations I defo agree for the final project but yeah I just wanted to learn to use Motion Matching with any animations and not be limited to market place or Lyra animations :slight_smile:

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The issue is probably the lack of root motion.

Normally turn in places uses root rotation to define the angle you rotate - agnostic of what system.

Without that information, the systemn is likely spitting in your face. I think.

Again, animation debug will help determine that…

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Again thank you so much for all the help. I’ll try the animation debug now :slight_smile:

(Update) Here’s the slo mo video with animation debug as suggested and I can see that the turn animation is firing after each time I move the character so I’m guessing if the Motion Matching is not trying to do walk stop animation with this one since there is no stop animations in the database at all. I forgot to include it in the video but when i turn in place the corresponding animations don’t get triggered at all and that’s I’m guessing is due to the root bone issue. I guess the Mixamo Converter app doesn’t fix the root bone issue on turn animations.

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Probably not.
It likely lets the pelvis keep turning but that motion needs to be moved ditectly onto the root bone for things to make sense to the system.

Quick fix it in blender.

Open the animation, drill down the skeleton in the animation strip until you see the pelvis bone.

Select the keyframes for the rotation XYZ W values and copy them.
Delete the keyframes you selected.
Go up to the root bone and paste the keyframes in.

Ideally the animation behaviour won’t change.

You can mix and match this process too. Say that the thing you used to port it ate your root motion values, you can copy the frames from the original animation directly onto the root bone of the new one…

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Another honorable mention to the debug process:

Srick an editor visible arrow into the character that isnt attached to the skeletal mesh.

With root motion/turn in place working you should see the arrow that points (forward or backwards, may be easier to spot backwards) rotating to always face and match the direction the animation is going.

When turn in olace plays, that arrow has to rotate along.

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I’ll get right on doing all that, Thank you so much for all the help and guidance, I really appreciate it!

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So firstly again I want to thank you very much for all the help as your guidance got me to the solution.

Well kinda xDD

Although it was a little bit more complex in blender than just copying and pasting the keyframes from pelvis bone to the root bone, that was the general gist of it and with that I did manage to get the character to turn in place as shown in the video below but the problem now is that the animation is to turn 90 degrees in each direction and instead the character attempts to turn as soon as I move the mouse which makes him look even more like with special needs… :rofl:

I’m guessing I would have to setup the AO now and somehow combine that with the whole locomotion setup to get it work as I’d like it to (which is that only once the character’s upper body turn’s about 90 degrees in each direction then the turn in place animation gets triggered just for legs and legs follow up with the upper body)

Also now I’ve noticed that I’m having another issue of the animations bugging for some unknown to me reason only while running or sprinting forward-right which can be seen in the later part of the video… My best guess is that’s it’s the Motion Matching system trying to do its’ best with the crappy animations it got…

That all being said I wanted to get back to the way you mentioned the “Interesting trash … they have come up with” xDD
Judging by the way you referred to the new Motion Matching system I’m guessing you’re not a fan of it and I suppose my ultimate question would be… Is it even worth investing time in its’ current (very early) stage, especially with limited access to high quality root motion based animations or is it better to stick with the good ol’ state machines system at least for the time being until the new system gets more perfected and more animations are available (mainly the 500 animations pack that’s due to be released this month?

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I think in all cases its best to stick with a system you make yourself so you fully understand it.

Be it old, simple, and dated, vs new shiny and nonsensical doesn’t really change all that much.

You can definitely get both things to work, but your next step after working at it a while is probably going to be a near worthless Rokoko motion capture suit, an iphone 11 to get the face stuff along.
In bith cases, you can, it’s better than nothing - but not by much.
If you also add in a Coil Pro to hope that the investment for the mocap suit becomes worthwile, well then youll be around 5k in the rabbit hole and essentially have noting to show (save for tax deductions :wink: ).

Once you use any of these to get a real base animation set going you’ll be spending nearly as much time on cleanup as you would have generating the entier animation from scratch.

Now if you dont know jack about how people move, this could indeed still be a worthwile investment.
If you are familiar with animation people, then its likely a waste of money.

With the exeption of the face capture, since its mostly free/only need the phone to link into unreal, and takes a lot of guess work out even for experienced folks.

With that, around 500 hours in cleanup and setup, you can make a predictive system without any of the new stuff. And adjusting it becomes trivial to you - simply because you made it.

Will it be worthwhile?
Probably not - chances are you wont find a company willing to pay you for the true cost.

Will it help your game? Sure, but was it worth it? Probably not.
Particulalty when you consider people like trash - dark janky souls, or the new version of it which moves equally janky.

Come to think of it, all the good games that hadd solid animation systems behind it (paragon?) utterly failed…
All the trash (ac greed?) which gets churned out faster than a duce seems to make it tons of money consistently.

With that in mind, if you are attracted to experiencing how to make it right, so that you actually know what you are conversing about when critiquing other people’s work…
Well, I find that to be an invaluable experience really.
Personally, unless you tried your hand at it I wouldn’t even consider your opinion on the end product…

So, with that in mind… am i a fan of anything epic has done in the past 4 to 5 years? NO.
They have been actively destroying their engine/people’s expectations/and theid documentation.

Does that mean the new system is factually trash?
That depends. To me it is.
But I put a significant investement into all of the above.

To someone else starting out it possibly becomes “treasure” (though i doubt it, it probably just makea it so they understand even less of how proper things should be done) - simply because you get to quickly release something as equally janky as the rest of the big sellers.

To the game dev community - obviously all of it is detrimental.
You just keep on diluting knowledge futher and further - kinda like they did with building pyramids.
You know… by now if you ask 10 folks at least 5 tell you aliens to your face. 1/2 ignoramus, probably 1/3 flat out idiots who have even worse theories, and maybe 1/10 who would actually think about looking it up or Knows…

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Again bro I can’t thank you enough for your valuable input! I really really appreciate it!

So to lay out some background when it comes to animation and especially character animation I’m a complete noob (apologies) xD I have a lot of experience with 3d softwares like C4D and Blender (but mostly modeling, texturing, lighting and rendering with very little non-character animation), I am a qualified java developer so I have solid understanding of fundamental programming principles, and I dabbled in Unity a tiny bit many years ago. I’ve never actually manually animated any character motion cycle and truth be told I’m terrified of it even with tools that make it all easier like Cascadeur… :sweat_smile:

Now for the past couple of years I’m trying to learn UE5 but I’m also a huge noob at it since it’s so vast! (I do it as a hobby whenever I can hence takes me so long to learn it). Ngl the way epic is making a lot of stuff easier to do does catch interest of someone like me.

The goal for now is to keep learning by doing and hopefully eventually learn enough to combine all that knowledge to complete an FPS project. Now since it’s a hobby I definitely don’t have the budget at the moment for a motion cap suit and software and even if I did have it I probably wouldn’t even know where to start with it so yeah that would be another huge learning curve but I do completely agree that it would be invaluable experience and I would defo like to go thru it… Maybe one day I will get a chance xDD But until then I’m limited with basically what I can find online and I do also agree that the older system doesn’t necessarily means that it’s worst then the new one and in some cases is quite the contrary, which seems to be the case here as well… I defeinitely don’t want to make something that looks janky either so I do hope that the new 500 animations pack will be of decent enough quality whether if used with motion matching system or without if you get me xD

Like you said no matter if it’s old, simple or dated if in the end it doesn’t really change much and once setup correctly it’s trivial to update since made by me!

As to pyramids I honestly don’t know who made them but I doubt it was Egyptians myself xDD

Again thank you so much for all the help bro! God bless!

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In this case, I would suggest taking some time to learn more about animation.

You will need to anyway, but in case the 500 animations are bad, you can use them as a decent starting point to create your own cusromized takes.

Its good to work with whatever as a starting point in lieu of running up the bill with the capture suit and all of that.

Also, please consider the cost of just paying a mocap studio to give you what you need.

It’s probably 1/2 or even less than the cost of the hardware and programs.
On top of that, most places dish out clean FBX you can use directly.
If going from a hobby into actual production this is probably the best way to get something usable.

Actually, it probably beats having to deal with actors to get your mocaps done?
Most places have a standing crew…