Please help with messed up animations!

Hello fellow ue4 users!

I´ve recently updated the engine from 4.7 to 4.11, wich made me start from scratch on the new version.
The thing is, I´m importing skeletal meshes of my characters, and there is one in particular that´s been giving me a headache. The mesh imports fine, after a few rotational tweaks, but the animations just keep on importing with all sorts of errors such as not matching the transform data of the mesh, weird lines coming out of the character, etc.
I think the problem is most likely coming from the file in blender, or the fbx exported files, but since I don´t know where the issue could be, I can´t fix it. (BTW, this particular skeletal mesh has been giving me a fight since version 4.7)

If any of you guys could take a look at the files, I´d be enourmously thankful.

Take care!

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Hey man, I imported your model here in Unreal to check it out and found some things.

Neat character :slight_smile:

When I imported the model it was rotated and the pivot apparently was on the center of the character.
I fixed it in Unreal but you will almost always want the pivot between your characters legs (especially in bipeds) before you even rig / skin / animate anything. It helps a LOT having the pivot in the correct place, prevents errors and other stuff :slight_smile:

You should check/search on blender in their export sections, I know you can change the scale/units you want to export, as well as what is considered the Up axis, I think blender’s and unreal’s axis are different.
(I mainly used 3DMax and we had to rotate the character’s pivot so that the Y axis was up when we were working with Unity3d, but I am not familiar with blender and Unreal so you will have to test it out for yourself)

Weird Lines: When you imported, Unreal surely showed you some alerts saying something along the lines of “vertex X has no weight, setting it to root” or something like that. This is the engine telling you that a vertice is not being influenced by any bone of your character so it automatically weights it to the root, That is why there are those weird lines. Those are vertices that aren’t influenced by any bone when the model was exported and then they were weighted to the root bone by the engine, they were pulled out of position. Check your skin in blender and you’ll see the problem.

I think the main problem you are having is with your bone structure + pivot. The root apparently is on the left of the character. Usually the biped setup used is:
You put the root in the same place as the pivot (between the character’s leg) then it goes up to the pelvis and from there it splits into thights and a spline and from there arms / neck / other stuff

In your setup when I’m looking at the bone hierarchy the radioman has it’s center to the left of the character, then the root is almost at his left elbow. This is really weird.

I’d tell you to remove your skeleton completely change the character’s pivot so that it’s between his legs and rotate it so that when you import it in unreal you don’t have to mess around with rotations and positions, >>>POSITION YOUR CHARACTER AT THE POSITION 0 0 0, IT’S VERY IMPORTANT<<< then you set up your new skeleton with the root at the same place as the pivot.

It prevents a shitton of problems and it’s probably what’s been screwing with you :slight_smile:

Hope it helps man, any more questions, just send them away.

Just an FYI. Blender and unreal have the same up axis. Z.

Hello, I went to look at the blend file, but you forgot to include the .blend1, that file contains very important information i will need like vertex data, to see the weight painting. It also includes the materials/textures which i dont need but just so you know in the future :wink:

Also, nunes is right about the rotation and origin. You dont need to delete the rig. Just hit ctrl c to recenter the 3d cursor and in object mode with both the mesh and rig individually hit ctrl a and select rotation. This will realign everything. Generally this happens if you rotate something in object mode. If you ever need to rotate or scale, always do it in edit mode. If you are not sure you can always bring up the object tool bar with n. and in there you will see the object scale, rotation, you can turn on and off the widget that shows normals direction on either vertex, face and edge. lots of good stuff in there. So I noticed when i brought it into unreal, i see none of the problems you mentioned. The only thing i did was recenter the origins. All animations play just like in blender. Also I cant wait to see progress on this game. The character is original and neat. Great work!

Hey guys, thanks for the help, and thank you for the kind words, I´m incredibly happy you guys liked the character.
So, I managed to find sometime today to fix my model using your suggestions. All the origin points have been zeroed out and both the mesh and rig have been scaled to correct dimensions, and after that, the mesh was parented again to the bones. It messed up the animations a little bit, but nothing unfixable (I already fixed one).
However, that whole process apparently messed up the uv mappings, since the skin on the character looks kinda pixelated.

Once again, Thank you for the help.
Take care!

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