UE 5.6.1 Retargeting animation from UE4 to UE5 skeleton

Hello everyone. Has anyone encountered a similar problem? In preview everything is good, but exported animation is deformed

Hello there @TurboDestruction!

That looks like a retarget mismatch. Just to retrace your steps, I assume you have already applied “Retarget Animations” to all your old assets, and transfer between the two types of skeletetons, as seen in the short guide below:

What the video doesn’t show, is that both skeletal meshes should be side by side, and animating in sync. And an incorrect pose could be causing the problem you are facing.

For that, checking around the community, other users have worked out this problem using a IK Retargeter, to properly pose the target mesh. Please test the following steps:

  • First, create the IK Retargeter via right-click → Animation → IK Retargeter, and set it like this:

    • Source = UE4 skeleton
    • Target = UE5 skeleton
  • Next, match the poses, save the base pose from the source, then create a new pose for the target, and adjust it to match the original pose. Check all your bones, as well.

  • Now, you can load a UE4 in the Retargeter, and if it still looks off, tweak the target pose until its aligned. Once that’s set, you can Export Animations to a new folder.

This is exactly what I did to get results on my screenshots. I tried to do same process at UE 5.4 and got perfect results where preview = export. Looks like Epic’s break something …again.

UPD: And looks like problem only in exporting stage: