This for the most part worked for me, I got tripped up right at the end deleting the root bone, when I already adjusted the fbx exporter to not add in an extra root bone, so I will need to go through the steps one more time to verify, but I’ve also spend some time tonight trying to fix the issues identified in a “rewrite” of the library. I started going down a rabbit hole of changing the bone names of the source armature the library uses, which lead to breaking other scripts of the library (poses), and it looks like there are quite a few more steps than I first imagined.
I reached out to the developer of the library to see if any of the issues you pointed out could be addressed. I’ll continue working on more Unreal friendly version of the library if we’re not the target audience of the library creator and if I get it working I’ll post it up here for you all.
Well I know that fbx exporter modification… I’ve no clue why so many do that. Even anims with root motion from the market-place works well with just deleting that bone as bone. But probably they would keep it for animating in Blender for some reason. Anyway if you have that export modification I think you should be save with just leaving the root bone as it is (probably check the rotation).
Regarding that “rewriting of the bone names” in the source. I would not recommend to do that. It’s not really that much bones to rename. The plugin creator is the same as the team leader of Makehuman and both protects the source to be stolen as a “NeutronuxLab or MakeNeutronuxHumans” via the unmodified version restriction. You only get the export as creative commons export if you use an unmodified version. If you change the sourcecode of the plugin (or Makehuman) then you only get an AGPL export (which is useless for UE4 because it’s incompatible to that open-source license).
I didn’t think of the license restrictions and modifying the bone names, but I suppose you are right, better safe than sorry. It doesn’t take more then 5 minutes to rename the bones, but when I want to just randomly generate 10 characters for a scene, its an excess hour of work that I was trying to avoid.
I will be working on this work flow again tonight and I am confident it will work thanks to your very thorough direction.
I was reading line by line
Finding chest
Turning it to max
Then proceeded to have a good laugh as I realized what I had done following the directions haha!
Retargetting works pretty well already if you change the pose. And compared to my try to make a similar tutorial for Makehuman the rotations from this one looks better: Blender Rigging and Animation - Character & Animation - Epic Developer Community Forums (screenshots from the Lab). If you do it before you finalize then you even get the morph targets (which could be pretty handy for emotes). It should be even possibe to save a pose I guess. The next version should include twist bones… which is pretty cool.
Your screenshot looks like you did not apply the armature modifier to the mesh before you applied the new rest pose to the skeleton in pose mode. If you don’t apply the armature modifier in the modifier tab before you change the rest pose of the armature in pose mode then the mesh would keep the pose of the old rest pose while the armature would get a new rest pose. This would result in an offset between mesh and armature like shown in the screenshot. If you apply the armature modifier to the mesh then it’s like a static mesh without any bones that is just in that pose (for a short time as you would add a new armature modifier back soon). If you re-add the changed armature back as modifier to the mesh then the mesh should not change anything as all those vertex-groups (with the bone names) are still there and both the mesh and the armature should be in the same pose.
I got it to work. Although I’m not really sure what the problem was. Seriously, I did the same thing over and over again, and voila. It suddenly worked. I can swear I followed every procedure perfectly…
Anyway, the retargetted animations still seem a bit off. Pelvis and arms are distorted. Guess I’ll have to try adjusting bones and weighting them until I get acceptable result. Nothing’s easy, eh?
Btw, did anybody get textures to work correctly? It looks like I have to redo UV to use MBLab characters in Unreal. Am I getting it right?
I tried to retarget the base animations to manuel’s characters (1.5), but it did not work, though I think I did everything right… The lower body is ok, bet then there is a twist in the upper body… did anyone encounter this and managed to solve it?
*edit:
I got it right this time, I followed this tutorial: http://www.albertodetena.com/?p=346
However I’m not sure what did I do differently which fixed the problem… I applied the modifiers before finalize, I deleted the first kexframes… anyway it’s working now, the only problem I see is that the back is bent too much compared to the mannequin.
weird those are the same steps we made on this post, by the way have you tried to use the new animation stuff that comes within the add-on in blender?, Im not sure if we have to make the animation ourselfs or if there is a library on the way that can match that skeleton
Version 1.6 is out. It’s now possible to load/save rest-pose before finalizing. That means you could change the rest-pose to UE4 friendly pose and still keep all shape-key/morphs for expressions.
The lower body is ok, bet then there is a twist in the upper body… did anyone encounter this and managed to solve it?
