I’m following in the footsteps of Mr Cheese, trying to set up my custom character now. I’m also using a Mixamo character, but I’m having trouble even getting the character to move. I noticed that the Mixamo rig happens to use the same skeleton(with the same naming scheme) as the HeroTPP rig. So I duplicated/retargetted the HeroTPP_Neuron_AnimBlueprint onto my mixamo character. I checked the Bone map array as well as the Transform(Modify) Bone nodes in the animgraph and all the bone targeting seems to be in order.
Then, of course, I linked my character blueprint to the animblueprint, put my character blueprint in the scene and hooked it up to the controller in the level blueprint.
But alas, when I run the simulation and play the animation in Axis, the demo characters move, but mine does not. Have I completely overlooked something? Am I missing any steps? Is there anyway to debug where the data is choking?
Thanks.
Hi Matt
if your character does not move at all, then please check following points:
Level BP: If you use a network connection, is the network controller connected to your animation BP?
Is your network controller configured accordingly (IP, Port,…)
For testing just use the same controller that already works for the HeroTPP.
Level BP: Is your character directly placed into the world or did you capsule it with a BP like the HeroTPP?
Please check if you get the animation instance correctly. This is different for the both cases.
For skeletal meshes use the skeletal mesh component reference (like Mannequin) and
for character based BP use the mesh reference (like HeroTPP).
Please check if the cast to your specific animation BP is successful,
for instance with a print at the “Cast failed” pin.
Animation BP: Please check if the correct controller (for e.g. network) is connected.
For debugging you could also set a breakpoint or connect a print to the “Read Neuron Motion Array” node and
check if rotation or translation values are coming in.
If nothing helps you could send me also your project if you want.
Best regards
Heiko
Wow, I guess I am pretty dumb. I thought I’d been thorough in my troubleshooting, but apparently I completely overlooked the fact that the “Cast to…” and “set” nodes were specific to each anim blueprint. Previously I had only swapped out the actor reference. Anyway, it’s working now! Hallelujah. Thank you.
I’ve been trying out your plugin and I must say, it is a vast improvement over the official PN Unreal plugin. I’m having some difficulty connecting the template to Axis Neuron on the same computer though. Am I supposed to connect via TCP or UDP? Does the avatar in Axis Neuron’s side need to have a specific name, or is there a place in Unreal’s side to set that name? Maybe it’s not even needed. I appreciate all your work and help, hopefully I’ll be able to make a donation in the coming days.
Edit #1:
It turns out that downgrading from Axis Neuron Pro to a normal version of Axis Neuron fixed this problem for me. Have you had any luck getting your plugin to work with Axis Neuron Pro?
Furthermore, I was also hoping you could give me some insight into where to tweak the Mannequin bones to have more accurate movement for characters with an A Pose. Even though all the limbs manage to stay together in the correct place, their rotation seems to be off. Do you have any suggestions?
First off, thanks for the plugin mate, it’s pretty awesome.
I am facing one kind of weirdness though: when I try to do a 180 degree turn, the model (my custom one, or the default one you gave in the template) never matches the rotation of my real world pose. And, on top of it, the movement goes all wonky. This is especially true when I put on the oculus. As long as I’m facing down the positive X-Axis in Unreal (the front in Unreal), my movement matches everything 1:1. The minute I make a 180 turn, boom. My character stops rotating past a certain point, and actively moves in the opposite direction of motion.
I tried printing out the rotation values for the Hips bone, the roll value goes between -180 to 180. Could that be the issue (to me that looks like the main issue)?
Could you clue me in to this problem? Any insight would be great.
Sorry for the late answers. I was quite busy to check the thread and got no mails from the forum SW.
If you need a quick answer write me a PM (seems to work better) or contact me over Skype.
@310Thirty:
The plugin works with any number of Neurons as long as this combination is supported by Axis Neuron Player.
‘Upper body’ and ‘hands only’ works good, but ‘legs only’ I didn’t tried yet.
@churly92:
The plugin uses TCP for the connection. Axis Neuron Pro works fine here.
Please check the following settings in Axis Neuron:
Output format: Rotation: XYZ, Displacement: Enabled (if not needed, disable it also in your BP controller node)
Broadcasting: TCP: Enabled, BVH: Enabled, Port: 7001 (or change it also in BP controller node), Format: String, Use old header: Disabled
A-Pose configuration:
Please have a look into the grey Mannequin animation BP.
In the animation graph, after the “Initialize Animation” there is an example how to map your A-Pose to the T-Pose.
Add here all the additional angles and all the bones to match the T-Pose.
It currently works not perfect, but helps in some cases.
@Dracomancer:
I think you mean the answer from Matt. He had a problem in his Level BP.
If you add a new skeleton you must inform the Anim BP which BP controller should be used.
This is currently done in the Level BP.
But you have to take care here which method you are using for configuration.
For skeletal meshes use the skeletal mesh component reference (like Mannequin) and
for character based BP use the mesh reference (like HeroTPP).
@mdhananjay:
So far I had no problem with the hips rotation in Unreal.
Can you check the animation in Axis Neuron?
Is the character rotation there like you wish?
If yes and the plugin makes something wrong, please send me a short Axis Neuron recording about it and I will have a look into it.
The animation in Axis was exactly as I needed it to be. After a lot of playing around, I found that, weirdly, the camera setting “Lock to HMD” was the culprit. Turned that off and voila! Worked like a charm.
I am evaluating your plugin for our project and experiencing some issues with parsing bvh animation stram coming from Neuron Axis over TCP in your PerceptionNeuronControler.cpp file. Particulary with counting floats in motionline on Tick. It results in the wrong value of FloatCount and NeuronRead function fails. I use UE 4.12, Neuron Axis 3.7.42.
My team and I have been using three PN for a couple of months and have a serious problem with hands tracking precision.
If you clap hands, then the palms permeate through each other in Axis Neuron. This is just begenning! If you start raising or moving down the hands (the palms pressed to each over), we see in Axis different picture. In case if I move the hands down then the palms are moving away from each other (in Axis neuron). In case if I raise the hands then the palms penetrate each over more and more. In reality, the arms move only up and down and remain pressed against each other.
We have tried to calibrate each sensor and the suit in general, but it hasn’t helped us. We tested it on several people and used different body parameters, but it didn’t help
Have you had such a problem? Could you please suggest any way how it is possible to fix it?
One more issue with PN: the longer we use PN the tracking becomes less pricecly. For example, after 30-40 minutes, the tracking precision of hands and legs not so accurate. After calibration (3 poses) it becomes pretty precisely again. Is there exist any way to avoid this problem?
@BlobTheToymaker: As already wrote per mail, please open the project in the template not directly.
Follow the installation instructions. Copy the template to your Unreal template folder and create a new project out of it.
@vanipel:
The PN suit uses IMU sensors to measure the acceleration (not position!) and rotation in the earth magnetic field.
Because of that, the absolute position is always an approximation and will be not as good as e.g. optical solutions.
But you are not alone, I have the same problems with the absolute positioning.
For animation recording my solution is to clean up the motion data later in an animation tool (Maya, Blender, …) and correct the absolute position there.
If you want to use the suit for live animations (like VR) and rely on absolute positions, then it is better to combine the suit with other hardware, like HTC Vive controllers.
Here are also some basic tips and tricks to get better results:
(I think you aready know them, but may be its useful for other users)
The very basic tip first:
Please make sure that you follow the 3 keys of good MoCap (Good Environment, Good placement of Neurons, Good calibration poses) explained here in this Noitom Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJFnyOVstsg
Measure the length of your actors bones and the distance between the joints and put the numbers into the ‘Body Size Manager’ in Axis Neuron.
Explained here in this second Noitom video (which has also some other useful tips): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Qm5qWIeAWc
I recently updated my project to 4.13, and I’m getting this error at runtime using the newest 4.13 binary version of the plugin.
There are no errors loading the editor so i wonder if the plugin also needs compiled for ‘Developement’ as well as ‘Development_Editor’
or something. Is the compiled version working at runtime for you in 4.13?
@alltrueist:
Just tried the Perception_Neuron_Plugin_0.3.1_UE4.13.zip again with a new BP based project, but I have no problems here with packaging and starting the runtime.
Could you check if you installed the new files into the correct folder and may be remove the old intermediate folder “Plugins\PerceptionNeuron\Intermediate”?
@ Cyxx
Thanks for verifying everything working in 4.13. Turns out I forgot to update my batch script which launches my -game to ‘4.13’ from ‘4.12’ which explains why it was working in editor but not at runtime. Bonehead Move. Sorry about that.
[MENTION=2200]Enter Reality[/MENTION]:
Sorry to hear that you had a crash.
Did you change the hostname (127.0.0.1) in the Neuron Controller Actor and if yes what name are you using?
When does the crash occur exactly? Immediately after you hit “Play”, when starting your packaged game or in the editor?
Is Axis Neuron SW running in that time?
Do you use any specialities in your network setup?
Does the crash occur with the original template?
Host name is the same.
The crash happen as soon as I hit play, it doesn’t even start ( both in the editor and standalone game )
Axis ( not latest version but 3.7.42.5837 ) is running
No special setup for the network
Original template doesn’t work for me, on 3 different PC I have the same error ( see below )
An error occurred while trying to generate project files.
Running C:/Program Files (x86)/Epic Games/4.13/Engine/Binaries/DotNET/UnrealBuildTool.exe -projectfiles -project=“D:/UE4_Projects/MyProject2/MyProject2.uproject” -game -rocket -progress
Visual C++ 2015 toolchain does not appear to be correctly installed. Please verify that “Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015” was selected when installing Visual Studio 2015.
Visual C++ 2015 toolchain does not appear to be correctly installed. Please verify that “Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015” was selected when installing Visual Studio 2015.
Discovering modules, targets and source code for project…
UnrealBuildTool Exception: ERROR: Failed to find cl.exe in the default toolchain directory C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Visual Studio 14.0\Common7\Tools…/…/VC/bin/x86_amd64\cl.exe. Please verify that “Common Tools for Visual C++ 2015” was selected when installing Visual Studio 2015.
I do have Common Tools installed by the way, so I’m not sure this error appears…
Also because on version 4.12.5 I’m able to use the plugin without any issues
[MENTION=2200]Enter Reality[/MENTION]:
Very strange. No problem here with both template or binary plugin in UE4.13.2 and Axis 3.7.42.5837.
Did you upgrade an existing project to 4.13.2 and reinstalled the plugin or tried setting up a new project?
If you upgraded, did you remove the PerceptionNeuron plugin folder completely and installed the new one?
Removed all Intermediate folders?
And may be you have an VS installation problem.
Since the PN template is based on the original C++ template “Third Person”, could you try creating and compiling a new 4.13.2 project based on that one?
Does the above “generate project files” errors occur also there?
