Retargetting Animation/Skeleton Woes

Let me preface by saying I have NEVER been good at this. But after a 3 hour trip down the rabbit hole trying to do this myself… I need help.

I got the two skeletons as close to similar poses as I possibly could:


the Mannequin

and my character

I lined up the bones as best as I could, which in all fairness they were lined up ■■■■ near perfectly but when I went to retarget


nightmare fuel…

I just want to be able to use the anims I bout so that I can start getting further in my game… It’s been 9 hours of bashing my head against the proverbial wall. Help

It might be that the head joint retargeting is retargetet properly, but mabe ( maybe in the advanced setup of the retargeting ) it is also retargeted to something else, like IK joints, and that’s why ou have the head stuck on the root.
Check again the retargeting options and make sure that the head is retargeted only to the head joint and nothing else.


after reading this comment I looked at the head and apparently it’s connecting the eyes and the top of the head… for fear of messing things up further and making the eyes pop out or something, how should I go about this to lessen the nightmare fuel and successfully implement the character?

That is correct, what I meant before is, in the retargeting option, to check if the additoinal joints are retargeted to the head, causing the issue with the head being stuck on the floor


What do I need to do? It looks fine to me

Uninstall Edge. :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

Aside from that, this isn’t the same pose you shared before.
So are you sure you are using the correct poses when you do the retargeting?
They show up as a preview in the side by side thing.

In the same panel you say looks ok, there’s an advanced button that can probably show you the IK and any other bone that’s being incorrectly retargeted.
Bottom left of the persona window, under the hierarchy you opened up.

Also the manage pose / view pose buttons could help with figuring out if you applied the correct pose or not.

in checking the base skeleton, and finding the advanced skeleton and putting in the bone mapping I discovered that I had never assigned the neck. In my excitement I tried to map the wrong skeleton to the wrong skeleton and accidently f’d up my 3rd person skeleton by mapping my character to it and not vice versa… So after deleting and restarting the project from scratch, HOPEFULLY that neck assignment was the mistake we’ll see

Newest nightmare fuel. I found the advanced option on retargeting, matched as much as I could up, and then fixed the neck issue.


And this was the end product… does ANYONE have experience with bringing/retargeting ready player me avatars into UE4? I really just want this to be over lol

Still seems like you messed up the settings - but we couldn’t possibly know without a screenshot of the original pose.

There’s a retarget settings on the skeleton that works on a per bone basis.
Usually you want root and IK (possibly hip) set to animation. Everything else set to skeleton.
Check on that.
If you set it all to animation scaled then the exact skeleton positions will be used. Possibly resulting in stretching/crunching.
Still, the point of retargeting is having a set of new animations that you can do that with usually…

Also, wasn’t hope the only think left in the darmn box? What’s up with that :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye: