Montage Mayhem!

Morning all,

I’ve been introducing some new movement to my character, simple stuff - sliding and a forward jump/vault. I’ve managed to get one montage to work correctly, it carries the capsule physics with it correctly although I do have to fix the final rotation as the animation goes end back in the same rotation. However all of my other montages do unusual things, like add in rotations that don’t occur in the animation normally. All of the montages have the same settings (RootMotion enabled, from first frame, scaled, etc).

I can’t figure it out at all! If there’s nothing super obvious I’ll try and get a few videos of it occurring to see if anyone can steer me in the right direction.

A couple of videos to help explain

This shows the working “vault” jump and then a slide which goes sideways (original slide does not go in that direction at all).

This shows two 180 spins being added in to the jump montage, they do not exist in the original animation at all.

I have a feeling there is a really sensible answer to it, something quite obvious that between the heat and me being silly I’m just not getting!

Not sure, but it could also be an issue with the skeleton retargeting settings? Make sure the Root Bone is translated to the Animation and not the Skeleton.
It’s normally something you figure out after 3 days and curse a lot for :stuck_out_tongue:

Without wanting to sound like an absolute dumbarse could you explain what you mean by translating the bone to animation vs skeleton?

Would this affect it even when the animations are done from Mixamo to this skeleton rather than re-targetted in UE?

EDIT- I’d completely forgotten about the pretty well hidden re-target options! Unfortunately I’d already changed the root to animation rather than skeleton due to another issue before.

exactly those. Make sure they are properly set, the root and any IK/weapon bones need to be set to animation.

For the roll, make sure the root bone isn’t rotating? It looks like it is, and the motion gets redirected to where the rootbone goes.

Try debug animation to visualize the bones during gameplay.
you can also slomo .5 to get a slower speed to analyze what gets messed up.

No other obvious tips…

Apologies for the delay - my PC died on me. I thought my PSU had gone and taken out my graphics card / HDD. Turns out it was the PCI-E slot that’s gone, not great but salvagable! I have lost about 3 days of work time due to it though, which is frustrating.

I’ll have another look - I’m not sure about IK/weapon bone status’.

I can’t see any rotations occurring on the root bone with it, quite baffled! It definitely looks like it when it’s played through the montage though. These are also identical animations that have been used in some tutorials which haven’t had the issues. Baffled!

I appreciate all the tips, I’ll start have a look through them over the next few days after I finish work.

So I’ve looked much more closely at the animations and there are some random rotations in it that I’ve missed where it literally flits to something strange and then back to where you’d expect it.

Is the only way for me to correct this to manually go in an work on each of the animations?

Yes, particularly because the root bone is set to follow the animated translations…

That sucks. I just don’t understand how the tutorials etc using the same animations aren’t having the issues. All good learning though.

So I had a bit of a break from trying to sort this and came back to it. I’ve looked closely at the animations and I don’t know what I saw before - but now they’re not showing any random rotations. I’ve opened the animations up in Blender and they’re fine in there too??

I’m completely baffled, partly because I’m sure I saw some unusual rotations on the gizmos and partly because if that’s not why it’s doing it I have no clue what is causing it.

So it wasn’t the animations! For anyone else having the same issue it was simple - I had not turned off “Use Controller Rotation Yaw” while the montage was playing, therefore there was fighting between the controller and the animation.