[Question] Clarification on Character rigging requirement

The creating a character for unreal engine .docx doesn’t cover a first person character rig. How can I find out any information on the guidelines of using the epics third person rig and modifying it or being able to use the first person from game template and still have it be accepted into the market place? I have an additional post here First Person Rig Requirements? - Marketplace - Epic Developer Community Forums

Jeff Lamarche’s response on that thread is exactly what I would have said. Unfortunately, the first person template game was setup long before we had the epic skeleton stuff planned. Again, this is assuming you would want to plug and play with the first person template character. Otherwise, you could just rig those arms to the epic skeleton and call it good to go.

However, I’m not the one who curates the submissions, so I can’t say for certain. I’ll try to track down someone who could give you a definite, but I think the best route (if you wanted to play it safe) is just rigging those arms up to the epic skeleton :slight_smile:

Edit: I just spoke with Lina Halper, the engineer writing our retargeting system, and I can say that an offline animation conversion system is coming, hopefully really really soon. Which means that you could rig your arms to the epic skeleton, and then someone could convert the template animations that ship with First Person Shooter template to your character if they wanted.

Thank you for your assistance!

@Jeremy/Lina, if you’re interested I created a script in Maya ( MEL ) which allows the retargeting from Mixamo skeletal rig to Epic skeletal rig…it took me 5 minutes to do that and by the way my knowledge of MEL is less then zero, I just copy&paste from the script editor :smiley:

The main issue that I had was related to the Y/Z axis problem because I couldn’t use HumanIK ( again because of the axis orientation ), and because previously our team was using Unity.

Anyway the script is using a orient constraint for all the bones ( with offset ) and a Point constraint, also I put the animation from Mixamo in T-pose before applying the animation, so it match the bind pose of my character ( even if the proportions/scale is different ).

It’ll be great to have a kind of retargeting ala HumanIK in order to match the bones and save it as a template :slight_smile:

Jeremy, thanks for providing these.

I noticed the EpicSkeleton_Placement.txt you shared has an A-pose, while EpicSkeleton_Template.fbx is in T-Pose. I tried also to reset the EpicSkeleton_Template.fbx by deleting the existing skin but it is apparently modeled in T-Pose.

Also, other than the A-pose difference, the joint positions between EpicSkeleton_Template.fbx (as well as a fresh export of HeroTPP from 4.6) compared to the skeleton generated in the A.R.T. tool via the imported EpicSkeleton_Placement.txt do not perfectly match. Is the skeleton created by these presets for A.R.T. truly in parity with the EpicSkeleton_Template.fbx / HeroTPP?

I think it would be helpful to everyone to have a EpicSkeleton_Placement.txt and EpicSkeleton_Settings.txt that match the EpicSkeleton_Template.fbx / HeroTPP 100%.

By the way, I’m trying to use them to spin up a custom character rigged to the Epic skeleton and with a control rig. This character is actually already skin weighted to the Epic skeleton but I don’t have a control rig for it. So I want to generate a control rig from the A.R.T. tool. I guess I have no option but to re-skin it but I am going to try copying the skin weights if I can.

Hey Coreyx!

Sorry about those not matching up. The joint mover template file must have been out of date.
Here is an accurate one, and it is also in the T-Pose as well, so they’ll match right up!

Awesome! Thanks Jeremy.