Hey everyone. I’m having a problem using the re-targeting tool in Unreal when it comes to two different rigs.
The rigs are actually identical, except the first one was made in Blender, and the second one I spent a good number of hours porting it to Maya. I thought it would be easier to just re-target the animations as the rigs are the same thing, just at different scale slightly. The rig I used was missing a few bones, like the clavicle, but that shouldn’t be an issue at all, since both the rigs are missing the exact same bones, right?
Problem is, is when I re-target with all these settings I get… this:
What the heck is going on here? I mean the animation is playing and it seems to be correct but the bones are abnormally large!
UE4 and Blender’s bone rotations and scales are different. If you export the Epic Rig from UE4 as an .fbx and open it in Blender you’ll see what I mean. You can rig a character to the exported UE4 skeleton and it will work fine but as far as creating an original rig in Blender goes you need to create your own animations as far as I know. Otherwise UE4 will always rotate and resize the Blender bones to match the rotation and scale of the UE4 bones in the original animation. Also, I don’t think you can leave bones out at all. It breaks the hierarchy and counts as a totally different rig. So, in short, my advice would be to export the character from UE4 (the blue guy) with his bones, delete the guy, resize and rig your character to the remaining skeleton (which is a serious pain in the butt since the bones will be tiny), then import him into UE4. That should work. There’s an entire tutorial on this on YouTube on the Unreal Engine channel if you watch the Third Person Series.
I’ve done this before with another rigged character, and it works perfectly. In fact I prefer to animate in blender so when I make new animations I just import it in my blender rig and simply re-target it to the maya rig with no problems. Although in that case what I did was import the maya .fbx into blender and add my own IK to it. So maybe if I did that process for this character, that might work.
Which Epic animations did you use? There are 4 skeletons and they are not all that compatible. There’s the old Blue Guy, Owen (with the trench coat), the Animation Starter Pack Guy, and the 4.8 guy. The Old Blue Guy sort of works with Owen but is completely incompatible with the Epic Standard Rig and/or the Animation Pack and none of them are compatible with the 4.8 guy.
