Root Bone Problem with Makehuman Character and Mixamo

Development Character & Animation
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I’m currently looking for a way to get mixamo animations to work with my Makehuman Character.

I created a character in Makehuman and rigged it with the Game Engine Rig. I then uploaded it to mixamo and downloaded the Climbing animation without the skin (only the animation).

I already checked for the Root Bone in the Skeletal Mesh which is present and on mixamo and in Blender I am getting the correct animation whereas in Unreal Engine the Root Bone doesn’t animate the way that it should.

EnableRootMotion is disabled, changing this checkbox sadly doesn’t do anything.

I created a video that shows the animation working in mixamo but not in unreal engine.
I also double checked the animation in blender and the root bone is present in the animation fbx but still it gets ignored in unreal engine. Is there a reason for this?

Has anyone come across this issue, or could someone give me a hint where I have to look in order to get same result as I’m seeing in mixamo or blender?

In Unreal Engine:

In Blender:

EDIT : Here are the FBX Files

TestCharacter.zip (16.0 MB)

1 Like
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These stuff sucks, basically everyone’s gonna come across. you need to rename the armature in Blender to “Armature”.
Also might have other problem, we’ll see later.

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Thank you for your reply.

To clarify, which armature are you speaking of?

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the two “Game_engine” in the outliner

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I renamed the armature as you suggested but the root bone of the animation is still as in the video above and not moving

armature

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yes, here comes the other problem I mentioned. let’s see your skeleton hierarchy in ue5 first

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The skeleton tree looks like this:

skeleton tree

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I just added the TestCharacter.zip to the post above in case that it helps

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Just took some time to test out and it’s working good for me.


what I just did:
download from mixamo, import to blender with default setting,
in edit mode create a root, make it parent of Hip bone
in pose mode copy hip location keyframes to root, delete hip location keyframes
in object mode apply rotation
and export with add leaf bone disabled
import to unreal with default setting
if everything is set, you’ll see root’s red line getting longer, and tick enable root motion the anim will come back to in-place.
these are basically standard operations i found out, I think you’d better try default skeleton and mesh from mixamo first in case they have conflicts.

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Thanks for the reply… Good news is that I found what was causing the issue. Bad news is that it messed up my whole skeletal mesh and I had to delete and import freshly from the ground up.

The problem was caused by the wrong orientation since MakeHuman didn’t allow me to rotate my character whilst exporting it as a fbx file. So I had to open the exported model in blender first and export the character with the right rotation axis and the scale…

For the sake of documentation, to give a clear answer, for others in the future and aswell as for my future self, I made a document that explains the process on how to export a MakeHuman Character, so that it can be used to generate mixamo animations and how to import the character mesh aswell as the animations in unreal engine:

Export Makehuman Model for Unreal Engine 5 through Blender.pdf (1.2 MB)

Also since Epic only allows 5 images simultaneously I thought why not make a pdf.

Hope it will help people in the future who want to combine MakeHuman together with mixamo and Unreal Engine!

Cheers!

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