Hey, just looking to see if anyone else has managed to get motion matching working for quadrupeds (e.g. horses)? I’ve been trying to play with the settings and this is the best result I can get, lots of animation skipping…
I have Root motion enabled on all anims, with the ‘ref pose’ and ‘force root lock’ on.
One thing I notice is that in my Motion Database preview, the green debug nodes that represent my ‘feet’ are 90 degree offset to my character and blue trajectory debug. Is this normal?
Looks promising if it allows one to avoid setting up state machine transitions and blendspaces.
I don’t see why it wouldnt work on just anything peovided you arent using Motion Warping.
Now:
if your character mesh/skeleton is set up to face forward on the wrong axis you’d probably get issues regarldess.
This could be what is happening; the horse should face toward(s) the blue line ?
The best option you have is to export the FBX of the latest mannequin and compare it to that of the horse.
If they both face the same way, then you are good skeletal/mesh/animation wise.
Originally, characters rotated the character mesh by 90 to match…
You culd have missed that, or they could have finally adjusted things not to be so backwards (doubtful), or the plugin could be making the same assumtpion…
I’m not a 3d artist, but all of the animations etc. work fine using ‘traditional’ blendspaces.
The horse follows the blue line just fine, the trajectory updates fine. Even if the model faces Y instead of X in Blender or Maya, the animation should take that into consideration no? For the preview in the Motion Database. It should calculate the correct bone position.
Are there any Unreal settings or animation updates I can make?
Thanks for your reply. Yeah after some testing with the help of a wonderful member of the discord community… Yes it is to do with the mesh having a ‘inbuilt’ rotation of 90. If you export, change the rotation, and import, it works. It also changes depending on the animation ‘starting’ pose.
Really these things shouldn’t matter and the system should be updated. I will leave it to Epic to make those improvements over time. I will stick to blendspaces for now!
I don’t think they are ever going to adjust that rotation issue.
Character face X forward in editors - and unreal still rotates them to face the screen by adding a 90d turn - usually within the character blueprint.
I wonder why the system assumes that 90 degree rotation to be in place…
What if you just do it - or un do it - within the horse character blueprint like regular characters?
(Say your horse doesn’t face the right way, turn it 180. Or whatever value needs to match screen forward).
Not sure that will in fact change anything - from the descriptions it seems to me as if the animation themselves need to have the x forward facing axis, but you never know…
In case of the animation themselves needing rotation:
Open in blender, access pose mode, click the root or armature, delete all frames for it.
On frame 0 rotate to the correct position, on last frame do the same, export.
Import in engine.
Its a 3 to 5 minute process for every animation.
Assuming this then gets the system to work, it may still save you a tone of time.
Consider 2 days work to set up proper transition animations.
Plus, you need the speed curves avaliable within the abimations to be able to figure out what to transition to - whereas from what i understood the other system picks the animation based on data you assign to them in engine, which is likely faster…
