Hi, I haver never managed to retarget an animation sucessfully. If I hit retarget on a known working animation to my new model regardless of where it was created - Metahuman, mixasmo etc… it ends up looking like this. The body animation maps perfectly but the heads remains in the same location
Any idea what I need to do to fix it?
Hi @TrevorDwyer, let’s see if we can figure this out 
, could you please provide the following information:
I have tried both 5.6 & 5.8. Both projects created from scratch in their respective versions. Live link is enabled but was never used.
I have since tried live link and live link works when linked to the iphone app but only for face anmimation.
As soon as I re target anything I get the image above./ It looks like the head stays where it is and the body moves around.
I have tried metahuman, ue4, ue5, mixamo, and Copresence models and always end up with the same result
Thanks for any help
No problem @TrevorDwyer let see if we can get to the bottom of this so that you can continue to work on your project
If you don’t mind, we’ll be taking this step by step. I will be providing you with how I’m setting up my project on my end and the steps I’m taking to re-target animations to make sure we are taking similar steps that way if something breaks I can go back on my end or ask you to check a specific part. I’m assuming that you already know how to set up your project to work with Metahumans since I can see that you are using one from your image so I will skip that part. During this process if my assumptions are wrong or you get stuck in any steps please let me know and I’ll be happy to help. Okay with that out of the way Let’s get to the fun part
Project Settings
Engine Version: UE 5.6.1 (these steps should also work with 5.7 and 5.8)
I’m starting a brand new project, I’m using the “Third Person” template and under “Variant” I’m using “all” just in case I need the resources that come with those variants in the future as we try to figure out what is causing you problems. You do not have to choose all, choose accordingly based on your project needs
Okay now that we are in the engine and the project is open, I’m just creating a metahuman and from the presets. For the purpose of this I’m removing the garment to be able to see the full body when I’m re-targeting the animations. If you want to do so as well, navigate to “Hair and Clothing” and double-click on the garment
Note: Make sure to enable the metahuman plugins to able to work and create them. And enable missing if you get the prompt to do so.
I’m just creating the rig and downloading the textures to be able to assemble the character. (this may take a few seconds)
Note: If the option to assemble your character does not appear after downloading the textures and creating the rig. Try clicking on another tab in the metahuman editor such as “Hair & Textures” and then go back to Assembly, the option to Assemble should be available now.
We can now close or minimize the Metahuman editor and go to your Content Browser. If you look closely, you can see that a new folder has now been added “Metahumans” inside of it you will find a folder with the name you selected during the assembly set up.
Okay just to recap, we now have set up our metahuman, it has been assembled, and we know the location of the Blueprint.
Custom Interface: your interface layout may look different from mines. I have edited my interface so that you can see the following panels easier
Custom Viewport:
Default Viewport
If you would like to edit your viewport to match mines you can:
select the Details Tab and drag it to the left side of the screen
Let’s add the content browsers, Window-> Content Browser-> Content Browser 1
Let’s add a 2nd Content Browser and drag it to the right side of the 1st one
Window → Content Browser → Content Browser 2
Let’s move the “Content Browser 2” window to the right side of “Content Browser 1” by dragging and dropping it there
We’ll re-orient the Outline by dragging and dropping the tab and making sure it lands on top of the upper right side of the “Content Browser 2”
To wrap it all up we can go ahead and resize the panels to your liking.
Retargeting the animations using project resources and external:
We will now cover how to retarget the animation using the resource from the variants we selected at the start of the project set-up. We’ll also cover using external animations, in this case Mixamo.
To keep things organized I’m going to create a folder to house our:
In All/Content/MetahumansI’m adding a MH_Anim folder (for Metahuman retargeted animations) and a Mix_Anim folder (for Mixamo’s animation)
Let’s start by using the Unreal Mannequin animations first. If you are having problems finding the animations in your project from the variant you choose, we can use the filter menu in the “Content Browsers”
Select the filter menu on “Content Browser 2” wile selecting “All” in your folder structure-> Select all filters → select Animation → Animation Sequence
This will now populate all of the animation sequences in the project.
I will be working with the “MM_” animations so I will type in in the search bar “MM_”, select MM_Attack_3 and use the keyboard shortcut “Ctrl+B” to go to the folder it’s in.
Right click the animation you would like to use, and select “Retarget Animations”
Once the Retarget Animations menu opens up, navigate to target skeletal mesh, and select your Metahuman’s Body mesh there.
Since I just want to retarget the MM_Attack animations I will just type “MM_Attack” in the search bar bellow and select all of the “MM_Attack animations”, if you would like to just retarget 1 then you can just choose one.
Note: if you want to see a preview of the animations to check that it won’t break you can just double click the animation you would like to preview and it will begin to play.
Let’s export the animations. With the animations selected, navigate to “Export Animations”, and select the folder we created to save the retargeted animations for our Metahuman character, I’ll name the prefix “Int_” for internal animations and click on export.
In Batch Export Options select import with the settings I have selected
And now in the Content Browser (in my case Content Browser 2) you will see the retargeted animations there
Let’s navigate to our Metahuman blueprint and drag and drop it in the level, rotate the metahuman blueprint in the level and re-orient your camera so that you can see the model better.
Now we can create a Level Sequence to test the animation.
I’ll create a Folder in /All/Game/MetaHumans and name it “Anim_Test”
Open the folder and create a Level Sequence, I’ll name it “Anim_Test_001”
Double click it to open it, your viewport may change to something similar to this, at the moment we are not going to be using those tabs so you can close them.
Let’s drag and drop our Metahuman blueprint in the level to the Level Sequencer timeline and delete the “MetaHuman_ControlRig” assigned to the Body by right clicking on top of it and selecting “Delete”
Now that the control rig has been removed we will now, go to Animation → Click on the plus sign next to it → add the animation we would like to test
let’s drag the animation to the last frame in our tikmeline so that we have more time to view the animation, click on “To Front” so that it takes us to the first frame and click on play to preview the full animation.
We will stop here for now so that you can check in with me once you’ve followed these steps to see if everything is going as it should on your end. If it is we will move to how to import external animations and retarget them. We will cover Live Link once we have both the internal and external animations running smoothly. Please do not enable it until then. I hope this is going well so far on your end and that it’s helping, please let me know if you come across any problems during these steps.
I’m glad you are finding it helpful @TrevorDwyer it’s my pleasure to help out , if you are referring to the pose in the preview of the image, I think in this specific case it has to do more with how the original animation was authored and at the frame I took the screen short vs how the animation is being retargeted, so as you go thru the walkthrough hopefully you will get the same results on your end without having to do anything else additionally. Keep in mind that the preview will only show the body being animated not the head, but once we get it retargeted we will see the entire body and head animated correctly. Additionally, we can also edit the animation before or after it has been retargeted in the animation editor in Unreal Engine, I personally recommend to do it after it has been retargeted since most of the time your character may have different proportions that were not taken into consideration when the animation you would like to retarget was being authored. You can see this specially when clothes are introduced such as puffy sleeves, skirts, capes, hats, or when the character has small shoulders, wider hips, thicker arms/hands. Essentially when limbs proportions change the position and portions may increase the probability of making contact with other parts of the body as it animates. If you would like I can include that information as well once we’ve made sure that you have been able to retarget animations successfully both from internal resources and external, that way you are not overwhelmed with too much info at once. If you run into any problems following the instructions above, please let me know and I’ll try my best to help out .
