Problems importing Maya made characters and animations previousely used in Unity3D

Development Character & Animation
1

We have 8 rigged characters with +30 animations and 8 rigged arms with 120 reload animations created with Maya advanced Skeleton tool.
These meshes worked fine in our Unity3d project, and we are importing them into UE4 now.

Right now we focus our work on the characters (well do the arms after that):
After importing, the character mesh is very small.
If we scale the meshes & bones in Maya 2013, the animations are broken in UE4.

UE4 also shows this log when we do importing:
‘‘Warning: A bone or bones with a non-identity scale factor was found for skeleton (skeleton root name: ‘transfrom1’).
Unreal does not support scale on bones so the FBX importer will attempt to apply the scale to the bone’s translation. If the results are not as intended, please use identify scale for all skeletons in the original scene.’’

Note that ‘transform1’ is auto generated by Maya when we do the scale action.

Is there a way we could reuse these rigged & animated meshes in UE4?
We are porting our entire project with 1 year of animation work and obviously remaking them all would be a nightmare. Epic, don’t hesitate to PM me with an email address, I would be more than happy to send some sample files, I hope you could try something, I’m sure you understand the scale of the work that might be lost otherwise.
Please help us!

In the meantime her’s an early preview of a map we started to convert today from Unity to Unreal :

http://puu.sh/7JXJl.jpg

2

you can scale the whole caracter in unreal, not need scale the bones.

3

Yeah, is unpractical to scale bones even for non-game related things; When creating skinned meshes is a sacred role in Maya to keep all bones size on 1,1,1 to avoid this kind of trouble.
You can move joints to scale the bones so I can’t why see to change its size on channel box. I guess you built characters on “centimeters” configuration and now have to re-scale them, so you should re-scale the entity in-engine, not in Maya.

4

This game looks familiar. Because you didn’t mention the title I wont either, but is it by chance abbreviated SU? If I am right then this game was the deciding factor for me to purchase a certain tool set for Unity. While I have loved learning game design with Unity, I see so much potential with UE4 and am focused on it for my first independent game.

5

We don’t support reference bone scaled, but we do support scale animated animation. Please import with 1 scale, and in-game, scale them accordingly.

Thanks,

–Lina,

6

Hello Lina,

We tried it but when we import the character and open the skeleton we get this broken preview in the editor;

http://puu.sh/7KXEN.jpg

Futher more when we want to create the physics asset with default values (5) we get this error;

http://puu.sh/7KXsW.jpg

Setting the minimum bone size to 0.05 (I supposed I should divide by100?) skips the error but then in the editor we got this;

http://puu.sh/7KXvM.png

I can only but imagine the preview doesn’t scale properly, but is that the only problem?
Editing the colliders seems to be impossible like this
What’s the solution for this?

@ thanks for the help, we tried it but unfortunately we got the above problems.
@emotionalplague; Yes you are right this is Storm United, we are porting the entire project to UE4 at this moment. This is very sad for me to leave our almost completed project out of unity, we have made the most advanced weapon editor ever made on Unity that competes easily with most FPS games out there… I’m probably going to sell it to another , but I first need to find someone serious about it, we’ve been working 18 months on it, it impressed many people including the Farcry 3 Project manager who said he never saw something this advanced so I currently don’t want to sell it for 1000 bucks…
In the meantime we’re porting everything in UE4 now… **** you Epic!

Here’s some progress of the map conversion;

http://puu.sh/7K8dw.jpg

Is it me or are we all between unity developers here? ^^

Best regards

7

Hi ,

Pleaes post this to the answerhub atanswers.unrealengine.com so we can further assist you. Thank you!

8

I’ve run into this issue before but my memory is a little foggy. You can fix it in Maya by turning off the property that adjusts the scale on bones. In Maya, this will cause the character’s bones to switch to its ‘true’ unaltered size. I’m surprised this did not cause any issues in Unity as well because it doesnt support that feature either. It will give Mecanim fits from what I recall. But the legacy animation system supports it apaprently

edit- Btw nice screenshots!

9

Thanks sandbox,

The screenshots have been taken when the bones where scaled to 1. Is this what you are speaking about or are you referring to a special parameter somewhere in Maya?

Edit

Apparently there’s been some confusion; The animations do work when scales are 1 but the preview in the editor are wrong.
Perhaps the issue is explained here a bit better:

10

Easy solution - Rig the characters that would be compatible with Unreal then just retarget all the animations onto the new rigs. Never use the Scale channels and you should be ok, in fact before retargeting lock all the scale channels… Hope this helps