I create my animations in Lightwave and then export the FBX file. When I import the FBX into UE4 everything works EXCEPT, the character’s root bone remains locked in place.
For example, when I animate a character running or jumping, all of the limbs move as they should but there is no up and down motion.
The arms and legs and head all work properly but they just flail around because the root / hips are stuck.
Any idea why this is happening? I tried to retarget the animation but that didn’t work.
The guy who made the video below had the same problem but didn’t post whether or not he found a solution.
Root motion. Root motion will lock the root bone of your hierarchy (looks like the root bone in the video and in your case is the Hip bone) and use it to drive the movement capsule of the character.
If you click on Show->Process Root Motion in Persona, you’ll see how the root motion is going to look like. This is expected behavior. If you don’t want this, simply disable it in the animation sequence settings.
Ideally, what you need to do is create an additional bone at your skeletal mesh origin and make that the root of your bone hierarchy.
For a running animation, the root bone on the floor should only have forward translation keys baked.
For a jump animation, you could bake vertical movement on the root bone, but the character movement component will not allow vertical root motion while your physics state is ‘Walking’. You’ll have to change that to ‘Flying’ before you play the root motion jump and then back to ‘Walking’ when your root motion montage ends. Or, you could also do a physics Jump exactly when you play the root motion jump, but it’s a little tricky to match the two.
I’d recommend not using root motion for the jump animation - use 3 jump states of Jump Start, Jump AirLoop and Jump Land. These 3 states will be able to handle varying jump heights/distances whereas your fixed length root motion jump might be too fast/slow.