Problem - When I try to change the Advanced Locomotion System (ALSv4) BodyMesh with a custom skeletal mesh (no animations attached) seems to work for everything (including a re-targeted AnimBP); however when I attach the Skeletal Mesh a child ALS_AnimMan_CharacterBP, the mesh is wildly distorted. It doesn’t make sense - as everything seems to work up until I attach the new I use this same process (below) to successfully import to the UE4 Third Person Template, but it fails completely with the ALSv4. The mesh was originally created in Maya, but has been exported in cutdown form.
Change the ALS Skeleton to a T Pose (the skeleton is already set to humanoid rig)
Import the new skeletal mesh (SKM_Soldier) - change to humanoid rig.
Retarget the SKM_Soldier skeleton (from root recursively set to skeleton, select Hip to Animation Scaled, select root to Animation - as per UE4 documentation) - this appears to work ok
Retarget the ALS_AnimBP (these all play OK in the animation editor)
Create a Soldier BP (Child from the ALS_AnimMan_CharacterBP) to form a new character class
Go into the Soldier BP > BodyMesh and change the skeletal mesh to SKM_Soldier
At this point the mesh becomes totally distorted (see images above)
So I had some progress - though enough. ALS_AnimMan_CharacterBP has two meshes, a higher level character mesh (which uses the AnimMan skeletal mesh) and a lower level (visible) skeletal mesh. Now what was happening was that I was retargeting (correctly I think) the new mesh onto the humanoid rig, but I was only changing the lower level Body Mesh - which gave me the cubist rendition above. However if I changed both the lower and higher level meshes to the new version (along with their re-targeted animation bp) then it worked fine. Except now I have lost ALL of the mantling and held-object controls/functionality that you are supposed to get with the ALSv4 template. I’m at a loss - I can change the character or lose functionality. I assume that the AnimMan skeletal mesh is the thing that maps all the specific object linkages - but the skeletal meshes just for some reason aren’t compatible.
Note - when I change to an official “UE4 rigged” skeletal mesh, it’s no drama at all.
Someone PLEASE HELP!.. this should be basic stuff for such a fundamental UE4 capability (ALSv4)
Did you ever resolve this issue? I am having a very similar problem with wild mesh distortions with ASLv4. I used the new IK Retargeting feature provided by UE5, and got all the animations from ASL retargeted nicely to my character. However, when I attempt to retarget the blueprint itself, the mesh in the preview is wildly distorted. I managed to get it such that when I press play, the character in the idle state is correct- but when I try to actually move, the mesh becomes MASSIVE and incredibly distorted. When the character is not moving, I am able to jump/crouch and the animations play correctly without distortion. It’s only when attempting to move the character mesh becomes out of control.
I did a bit of troubleshooting in the animation blueprint, and found that if I break the “AimOffsetBehaviors” connection, the mesh in the blueprint preview displays correctly, instead of being wildly distorted. But the issue with distortion during movement remains.
The issue, as far as I can tell, seems to be that the ALS blueprint is causing the character mesh scale to become massive and distorted during movement. But I have been unable to narrow down exactly which nodes are the culprit, or how to correct them.
having the same issue. Would really like to know if there’s a solution for this in UE5
EDIT: A lovely guy on the ALS Discord told me that retargeting often breaks base poses in additive animations. You have to manually plug in the correct base pose in every animation that uses an additive. Once that’s done character should work fine.
solution is to check all the retargeted animations that use additive animations. Retargeting breaks their base pose. You’ll have to manually plug each base pose it. Check my comment above on how to do it
Hey! Sorry I don’t have that project anymore but what you need to do is go through each animation and check its counterpart animation for the ALS manequine. In the details panel, scroll down till you find a section for “additive animation”. There, some ALS animations will have specific additive animations that you need to retarget and place in the counterpart animation of your character. That should fix this
Look, I need a lot of help, I wanted to reopen this topic, I was using a mesh from the marketplace called StickMan, which are the white character from the first image, I put it as my character’s BodyMesh and it’s simply normal, now when I try to change the mesh it gets all distorted , it looks small and some have the bones all distorted, as you can see in the other images, even the meshes of the ALS V4 itself look like this, only the Stickman character’s mesh is normal,how u can see,the last photo has the two T pose characters that are totally normal without i put on the BodyMesh,and on the left has the BodyMesh from the main Blueprint,and u can see the difference between
PLEASE SOMEONE HELP ME, I need to continue my project with other characters and because of that I’m stuck
