First off, I’m very much a ‘hobbyist’ and this may be a Blender (rather than Unreal Engine) problem.
I have a character I created using Vroid (an anime character creator). I’m creating animations in Blender (2.93.5) and importing them (using the ‘Better FBX exporter’ plugin) into Unreal Engine 4.26 (UE4). I’m applying them to a rig which I’ve already imported into UE4.
When I import the animations into UE4, something weird happens to certain parts of the character (see picture). Notably, the hands, feet and bust. I’ve also used the rig with Mixamo to create some animations and imported them into UE4 with no problems.
I’ve included some of the ‘output log’ from UE4 below if that helps. In particular, I’m wondering about these ‘invalid values’.
Any ideas on how to fix this? Incidentally, please don’t tell me to use a character compatible with the default UE4 skeleton as that would involve re-doing a lot of work for my project at this stage.
do the vroid characters have skels?
Why not use the one from the vroid fbx
or
you will have to possibly delete a couple of “leaf bones” that blender added to the tips of things
like your wobbly fingers
or
load ther vroid model with its own skel then in unreal retarget the the other skel to the vroid skel then you can disable certain bones in the retargeting manage to fix it
I can’t give you details, its trial and error to make sure the bones match
but I do think you have leaf bones adding in blender on your fbx export
Yes, I initially loaded the vroid fbx model directly into UE4 (this is the pre-existing rig I referred to). I’ve applied animations created with Mixamo directly to it with no problems.
I did experiment with disabling leaf bones in Blender without success. However, Blender’s leaf bones do seem like the most likely thing to be causing the problem since the deformations happen in places where leaf bones would exist (fingers, toes and bust). So I’ll go back and try again.
For anyone suffering similar issues, I’ve found the solution now: When using the Better FBX Importer & Exporter plugin, I was using the wrong import settings. I tried disabling ‘Automatic Bone Orientation’ and setting leaf bones to ‘short’ when importing the FBX in to Blender and this fixed the problem.
Another thing that might help is
if your anims are mixamo
then a-pose the vroid and send it up to mixamo n an a pose
mixamo will usually rig it well and then it will be a mixamo skel not a retarget.
I actually use mixamo to rig the MB-labs meshes from blender so I can use mixamo anims
You inspired me to look more into the possibility of leaf bones causing the problems. It turns out it was when I imported the animations (originally created using Deepmotion) into Blender. I was using the wrong import settings as per my post here:
So thanks again for your help as I almost certainly wouldn’t have found the solution without it!
