I’m trying to implement a very simple locomotion system using root motion.
I have three animations: Idle (no root motion needed), Turn and Walk. I checked the “Root Motion” flag in the anim sequences and chose Everything as root motion mode in my animBP default settings.
The AnimBP only consists of a fairly simple state machine driven by an enumeration variable (the value is read from c++ pawn class).
Everything actually works fine, except for the fact that root motion information is extracted but not applied to the skeletal mesh (the mesh stays in place, neither rotation nor translation). Am I missing something?
Sorry, my fault.
After creating the thread I found out that the Root bone is supposed to be centered in the origin. I downloaded some free animations from mixamo where the root bone is the pelvis, that’s why I was having problems.
Still, I don’t understand why root motion seems to have made a big step backward compared to UE3 (my opinion): in UDK it was possible to split Root motion in the 3 axis choosing which to ignore, and there was no particular restriction regarding root bone location
I would also be interested to hear about this root/hip bone thing. Coming from a Maya non-games background I am used to having the root bone being in the center of the hip and at a height based on the feet being planted on the Zero level height.
I have seen a few UE skeletons that have some funny looking extra joints at the feet and then connecting up to the hips.
Is this common/correct practice?
Do people not animate with the feet planted at Zero height? Should I animate with hips around origin?
It’s pretty common to have a separate root bone at the origin, and then the hips off of that. The extra joints you see coming from the root bone to the hands, feet, etc. are usually used for IKs. It’s less performance intensive to have IK’s calculated from the root bone.