I recently started animating and in all my animations my root always stays in the center. This is also true when i retarget mocap animations.
In most cases my character stays in place just like the root, so no root motion there…however what about the other cases? my character moves around, but my root stays stationary… what should I do with those animations… I want to move the character capsule somehow. I could transfer the motion from the pelvis to the root, though not sure what is the best way to do that (Blender)… or maybe i can do something else…
If you are talking about already existing animations with pelvis only movement. You could separate the forward and lateral components of the movement vector. Then you can keep the lateral movement on the pelvis and transfer the forward to the root bone. I made a plugin to do this a while back when I wanted to fix a mixamo animation with noisy movement.
I think the way most animators make new root motion animation is just to move the root bone itself then animate the feet and pelvis. That is mostly what I have seen on youtube. Now I am not animator, but I am not fond of this method. I think it is more appropriate to film based animation rather than animation for games. That is just a first impression however, not really done this a lot.
So, if I want to have a particular animation to use root motion in ue4 i have to move the root in blender. ofc it’s logical, I just watched a tutorial series a while back which said I shouldn’t move the root bone, it always stays at the middle.
Also when i retarget a not-inplace mixamo in blender then the motion is transfered to the pelvis… i will have a root, but it won’t be the bone which moves. So it would seem I need to transfer the forward motion from pelvis to root… I can probably do it manually, but an automated method would be nice…
that plugin you mentioned is for ue4 or Blender? can you share it? thx
That plugin is not for release, it was for ue4 and it was a long time ago, made for 4.11 or 4.12 i think. I still have it around somewhere but it is not going to work now anyway.
The point was that the method works and you can probably implement this in blender itself. Although the math library in unreal is a lot more user friendly.
Hi did you ever figure this out? Looking to do something similar and struggling to find a solution…
So the root bone is used to determine where in world the current position of the root relative to the position of the mesh as referenced to ground. UE keeps track of the current position of the root bone if it’s set as being root motion in both the animation BP as well as a parameter of the animation sequence. This allows UE to exit at any point with in the cycle, say a run forward, at the correct point with in the sequence.
If we are talking about creating the actual root motion animation in a 3d application the way I do it is to position constraint the root bone to the hip joint but restrict the up/down vector of the joint so it goes along for the ride as far as position goes